Life After
by chris the cynic
Summary: A villain in the future changes Kim's past and with it the entire world. Death and life collide while people at three points in space and time try to survive and, if possible, set things right. Kim struggles to return to the world she knows; Tara, Josh, and Bonnie join with Ron in 2004 Middleton; in 2029 a hero and villain face a hostile world where they were never born.
1. I-1: Time Changes

[Shin Possible is the creation of Blackbird, used with permission.]

 **Part I: Things Fall Apart  
Chapter 1: Time Changes**

 **X**  
 **O O**  
 **⁂** \+ **⁂**  
 **⁂** **⁂** **⁂** **⁂**  
 **⁂** \+ + + **⁂  
** **⁂** **⁂** \+ + **⁂ ⁂  
** **⁂** \+ **⁂** \+ **⁂** \+ **⁂  
** **⁂ ⁂** **⁂** **⁂** **⁂ ⁂ ⁂** **⁂**

 **2029 – Earth**

Jacob was wiring something together from components he'd ripped out of cellphones. With the boss he never found himself this bored, but with the boss taking time off for personal reasons, and him needing to stay in fighting trim to be able to fulfill his duty when she came back, he'd been hiring himself out to lesser lights of the villainous world.

With them he felt like the great Shego, before she switched sides, if she'd lost her nail file.

So on the way over he'd picked the pockets of some rich kids, stripped their phones down to the bare essentials, and was now making something. He didn't know what; he didn't care. At the moment he was maximizing power and reception, because those made sense when you started with cell phones, after that he'd probably work on transmission strength.

If you just did what came naturally, you could actually make a lot of progress on a project before you knew what the project would be.

It was certainly better than listening to the slob, who passed for his current employer, drone on.

Mancer was nothing like the boss. He was an nth rate villain who didn't even know that the suffix "-mancer" meant "seer", as in a prophet or oracle, not "mage" or "magic user" in general. The man couldn't even get his own name right, how could he possibly hope to accomplish anything?

If some hero didn't show up to stop Mancer soon, Jacob thought he might scream. But he concentrated on the device he was making as a way to keep hold on his sanity.

Then the door exploded inward, and there was a distinctive green glow amid the dust and debris of the shattered frame. Jacob smiled. This was why he took the job. He could in fact care less about Mancer's money, but not much. There simply wasn't that much space between the amount he cared and absolute apathy for the caring less to take place in. No, he needed practice, and whichever one of _them_ it turned out to be, Jacob was sure he'd get that.

⁂

Shin walked into the room, a very sparse underground lair mostly in brushed concrete, and saw the stolen relics on a central table arranged for some kind of ritual, already in progress from the looks of it. She also saw her arch nemesis, Jacob, quickly shove something into one of his coat pockets.

"Starting to think you're following me, Possible," he said. "How did you even know I was here?"

It was half true. When she'd heard about the artifact theft she'd figured the local authorities could handle it until she found out Jacob was in the area. She wasn't going to throw local cops in the path of her arch nemesis even if this whole thing did seem like it was beneath his pay grade and her notice.

Still, it was only half true, and she wasn't about to feed his ego. "You think too highly of yourself," she said. "I'm here for those," she pointed at the artifacts.

"Those trinkets?" Jacob asked in obviously fake surprise. "Besides, I thought you brought your girlfriend along on occult missions."

"She's taking some children trick-or-treating," Shin snapped.

"That sounds very responsible of her," Jacob said. There was no jab there, just a simple statement, but Shin knew an attempt to throw her off her game was coming.

"I was looking forward to spending tonight doing that-"

"You are aware it's still light out, right?" Jacob asked,

"Some of the kids are really young," Shin said. They'd be dropped off at their respective homes before it got too dark, it was all planned out. "Anyway, I was looking forward to watching the children _with her_ but somebody-"

"Has to be the grown up in your relationship," Jacob said. "So when the call came in she stayed behind to be the responsible one while you came out to play. I get it now."

Shin had been planing to say that _somebody_ had to go and break the law on Halloween. He made it sound like she _wanted_ to be here instead of with her girlfriend. She was through with the verbal stage of the fight, she tossed a ball of plasma in his direction.

⁂

A key factor in any fight was maintaining an awareness of your surroundings, otherwise you could dodge right into a wall, deflect a blow into a multiphase tachyon transducer, or step right off a cliff.

It was in the course of maintaining that vital awareness that Jacob noticed something.

"Time out," he called to Shin.

Once he was sure there wouldn't be any plasma coming his way, he addressed Mancer.

"The elder Possible looks pretty young there," he said pointing to to a hole in reality itself, hovering in the air, that showed the spot in space and time Mancer intended to affect.

Mancer didn't respond to Jacob and instead continued reciting an incantation that he erroneously thought was in Latin. The fact Mancer didn't know it wasn't Latin set Jacob's mind somewhat at ease. What harm could a fool like Mancer really do?

"I hope my real boss rejoins the game soon," Jacob said to Shin, "freelancing sucks."

"My heart aches for you," Shin said in perfect deadpan.

"You have any idea regarding how long ago that is?" Jacob asked Shin.

"That's the transportulator," Shin said pointing to a device her mother was standing near in image of the past.

"Dr. Dementor's hardline transporter?" Jacob asked.

"Yeah."

"Which Drakken tricked your mom into stealing it because she's so very easy-"

"Yes."

"Caused no less than sixteen people to become convinced we were living in the Matrix?"

"Yes already!"

"When did your mom deal with it?" Jacob asked.

"High school," Shin said. Jacob's eyes went wide. "Near the start of junior year."

"Mancer!" Jacob shouted. "You can't mess with 2004! I won't even be born if you screw up that part of the timeline!"

Mancer did finally look at Jacob. "That's of no concern to me; I was already around."

"You think you'd be the same person with more than twenty years of your life swapped out for those in the new timeline!?" Jacob shouted. "You'll annihilate yourself and turn your life and body over to someone else!"

"I'm protected," Mancer said.

When a ball of plasma exploded against an invisible sphere that, Jacob estimated, was centered on Mancer. Jacob did the only sensible thing. He flinched back and raised his arms to cover his face for protection.

"Warn me before you do something like that," Jacob shouted back toward Shin, then he turned to Mancer again, "You think a magical shield is going to save you from changing the entire damned timeline?"

"No," Mancer said in a condescending way. That was good, condescension could lead to explanation. "Whosoever takes one of the thirteen malachite amulets from the sacred urn," Mancer said gesturing at a skyphos, which was nothing like an urn, "is immune to timeline changes."

The skyphos was inside of the invisible bubble, Jacob couldn't reach it. Besides, he had a different question, "Why thirteen? There's just one of you."

"Feeble minds such as yours cannot hope to understand the complexities-"

"The spell called for a full tribunal, didn't it?" Shin asked.

Jacob turned to Shin and didn't hide the confusion he was feeling.

"A tribunal is composed so that it has one and only one member who was born in each of the lunar months," Shin explained.

Jacob nodded. Thirteen months in a lunar year.

"If it's intended for a tribunal it means that they thought anyone attempting to do it on their own was dangerously stupid," Shin said.

Mancer snorted like any half-rate villain who'd had incompetence exposed, and then said, "You clearly don't understand the-"

"You weren't smart enough to modify the spell into a single practitioner affair," Jacob said, "so you took the much easier shortcut of tricking the spell into thinking there were twelve other people and then preformed it as originally written, right?"

"You served your purpose," Mancer said. "You distracted her until the ritual itself protected me and now nothing can stop it. See!" He pointed at the hole in reality that was a window through time. The image of Kim Possible dialing the telephone number of her school in preparation for using the transportulator flickered, then she was shown to have dialed a five where in the original timeline she'd put in a six.

Jacob was confused.

"That's it?" Jacob asked. "You've summoned power so great it threatens to tear the universe asunder and all you did was change a six to a five?"

"Don't underestimate the little things, my former employee," Mancer said.

"For want of a nail?' Jacob asked.

"Nothing so subtle," Mancer said. There was cruelty in the laugh that followed.

Shin turned to Jacob, "What if the changed number was a cellphone number?"

A look of horror passed over Jacob's face. There was a reason that the transportulator was hardline _only_.

"Nothing so provincial," Mancer said.

Mancer grabbed one of the malachite amulets from the skyphos, then disappeared in a puff of something Jacob was pretty sure wasn't logic. The world around them started to warp and twist.

"Grab the malachite!" Shin shouted. Jacob lunged, taking on faith that the magic shield had disappeared with Mancer, and got a piece just as the last remnants of the spell collapsed into nothingness.

The room went dark.

⁂

Jacob coughed somewhere to her right. "That is foul," he said.

Shin agreed. The air, which had been fine before, now made her want to retch and her stomach churned with every breath she took.

Shin lit her right hand. The green glow showed a largely unchanged lair, the walls were where they left them, the ten remaining malachite amulets were where they'd fallen when she and Jacob had knocked over their container in their rush to get one each.

"Show off," Jacob grumbled, looking at Shin's lit hand. Then he reached into one of his pockets, rummaged a bit, and finally removed one of his improvised inventions. When he put it on a small illuminated disk was held in the palm of his hand. When he activated it, which he did in spite of it having no obvious controls, it became a flashlight, shining out in electric blue.

"Now who's the show off?" Shin asked, but Jacob seemed more concerned with what he was seeing.

Shin looked around again, with the added light from Jacob she could see massive changes that had been invisible before.

Every surface seemed to be covered in mold, explaining the foul air, and mushrooms had grown through the floor and walls in cracks that hadn't been there before. What little wood there had been was rotted. Metal rusted.

It got worse from there.

"This whole place is drowning in decay," Shin said.

"Let's get out of here," Jacob said, "before we inhale something we'll regret."

"I already regret it," Shin said.

They were nemeses, but they'd worked together more than once and, as long as neither of them acknowledged camaraderie, it shouldn't complicate their relationship too much to do it again now.

Shin collected the ten other amulets into a pouch, and followed Jacob out of the room.

⁂

Jacob heard Shin emerge from the remnants of the building, walk over the same rubble he'd come over, and finally stop beside him. He barely registered any of it.

"This was a city when we went underground, right?" Shin said.

Jacob surveyed the wreckage again. Buildings reduced to mounds, roads and sidewalks cracked by what passed for vegetation -mostly myriad forms of fungus that seemed to have decided to replace trees, bushes, grass, and everything else that grew- other places where it was simply impossible to tell what had been road, sidewalk, building, and so forth, rust heaps that might once have been cars and trucks, -no sign of recent human habitation. Also not enough rubble. It was as if the fallen tops of the buildings had been reduced to dust and blown away.

Then he said, "We'll want to look for new construction-"

"Less than 25 years old," Shin said, "or thereabouts."

"Exactly," Jacob said, "What changed after he changed time."

"How could one digit change all this?" Shin asked.

"Your mother was teleporting," Jacob said. "Where she went, we don't know. What she found there, we don't know. How, if at all, she made it back, we don't know."

"You think she brought something back with her?" Shin asked.

Jacob nodded.

"Something from elsewhere."

Jacob nodded.

"Then the question becomes, 'What could have done all this?'" Shin gestured to the remains of the city.

"I don't know," Jacob said as he looked around again, "but I haven't seen chipmunk or squirrel or heard a single bird chirp, since we got outside."

⁂

"You think everything's dead?" Shin asked. Fungus seemed to rule the city, so something lived.

It didn't just live, it thrived to an impossible degree. Various mushrooms ranged in size from normal to the size of trees. Other fungi in evidence had relatively thin membranes instead of stalks or caps, and the membranes folded in on themselves into strange shapes. Somewhere between those two two were orange peel fungus, which Shin recognized from her time as a pixie scout, it didn't fold that much, and the cup shape kind of almost looked like a mushroom cap sometimes, if you squinted. They definitely weren't supposed to be waist height though. In their own way they were as impressive as the tree sized mushrooms. Other things were all stem, they reached up in the twisting bending columns that Shin thought she recognized as "coral fungus". There were also ones that were mostly bulbous things in clusters like some kind of strange, sometimes giant, grapes.

When she looked for a living thing other than fungus the best she could do was note that a single tree in the distance existed and even looked alive.

"At least it's colorful," Jacob said.

Bright orange fungus, white fungus, red fungus, bright yellow fungus, a bit of pale purple fungus. A fair range. It was colorful. But that was hardly the point.

"Forget the scenery," Shin said, "Just do your mad science thing and-"

"Angry science is seldom good science," Jacob said.

"You know what I mean," Shin said, "just-"

Something moved in her peripheral vision.

"What?" Jacob asked.

"Did you see-"

Something else moved.

"Saw it," Jacob said. "Back to back?"

"Yeah," Shin said. Jacob pulled his hand-flashlight off and pulled out "gloves" Shin had grown to hate. They didn't look like much: wires connecting various small panels -mostly disk shaped, which seemed to be Jacob's preferred format. The disks at the palms didn't look all that different from his flashlight, actually.

The gloves had two main functions. One wouldn't matter as Jacob didn't have his hoverboard. The other was that it allowed him to catch and redirect her plasma. It was like the xistera hand mods on her mother's battle-suit, but worse.

Soon he was out of her field of view, one of the downsides of standing back to back, but by the time Jacob's shoulder blades touched her own she heard the soft hum that meant the gloves were active.

"Pass me ammo?" Jacob asked.

In each hand Shin formed a plasma ball the size of a softball, then shot them straight back.

"Thanks," Jacob said.

"I don't like that they're not letting us see them," Shin said.

"That's what worries you?" Jacob asked.

"If we don't know what we're facing, we can't form a plan," Shin said.

"Which is why it's an unremarkable tactic to keep an enemy off balance," Jacob said.

"So what's got you worried O' great and smart evil one?" Shin said with what she figured was just enough contempt that it would let Jacob know how she felt without damaging their ability to fight as a unit.

"That they're swarming," Jacob said.

Shin hadn't been paying attention to that. She'd been so focused on trying to get a clear look at one of them that she hadn't noticed how much movement she was picking up in the unclear looks. Bodies mostly hidden by what used to be buildings, or behind the tree sized mushrooms and assorted other fungus. Non-stop motion at the periphery -the one place neither she nor Jacob would be able to get a clear look.

"Unless you're planning on repeatedly stopping during combat to give me fresh plasma," Jacob said, "I've got two shots before I'm close combat only." Shin nodded even though she knew Jacob couldn't see it. "I don't like the idea of letting that many opponents get close."

"Getting soft?" Shin asked.

"You wish," Jacob said.

Then the charge started.

They came from all sides and rushed the hero and the villain.

When Shin saw how they looked, she said, "If they wanted me off balance they should have let me see see how they looked from the start."

Jacob responded with, "Given that they look like _that_."

Four shots of plasma were fired, and the battle was joined.

⁂

 **2004 - Earth**

"It really does work like a phone," Kim said. She dialed the number for Middleton high school back in the US. There was a ring, then a high tone, then a trilling tone, and Kim was gone.

⁂

By the time Mr. Barkin said, "Last call for Kim Possible," Tara was pretty sure everyone in the auditorium knew why Ron's act had gone on for so long. He'd always been there for her and he'd been doing it again. Stalling so that she'd have time to make it from wherever she was.

Sometimes Tara thought Ron was a bit too loyal. This time he'd given himself a head injury, in the stunt that finally ended his act, just so Kim could make it to a largely meaningless competition. Sure, Bonnie had pushed Tara into showing up for what she saw as her inevitable victory, but apart from the people in the room, who really cared about the talent show?

At the resounding silence, the utter lack of any sign of Kim, Mr. Barkin said, "Ok, then-"

There was an explosion. Tara felt the shock wave as much as heard the blast.

Mr. Barkin said, "Nobody-" and that was when the lights went out, and everyone panicked.

Then came the sounds of screaming from backstage.

Tara didn't actually decide to get out of her seat, she didn't decide to rush through the darkness, she didn't decide to move toward the screaming. She just thought, _Ron_ , and found herself on her way. She said, "Sorry" and, "Excuse me," to the people she bumped on the way.

She was up on stage, almost at the curtains, by the time the first light sources came on: BlackBerries that parents in the audience thought to turn on so they could use the light from the screens. By then the screaming had stopped.

As she moved backstage she followed the lead of the parents, though the only light her phone produced was a from a pitiful green diode that served to let her know the phone was on. Still, with her eyes adjusted to the darkness, a small LED was all she needed.

She found Ron unconscious, his head bandaged, Rufus standing guard over Ron, and no one else.

The emergency lights came on. When her eyes adjusted to the new light she saw blood and a few scraps of clothing. A bunch of blood on the floor and a nearyby wall in one place, a trail of blood leading out a door. Someone had been hurt -a lot- and then their bleeding body had been dragged from the room.

Tara cautiously looked through the doorway the blood trail led out of.

What greeted her was a regular hall, except for the blood. Since it wasn't a controlled environment like the auditorium, light came not just from the emergency lights, but also from outside. It had to pass through a window, a classroom, and a door window to reach the hall, but Tara was willing to take what she could get.

Sill, other than the blood trail, there was no sign of whoever had been hurt or whatever had hurt them. Tara knew better than to go off alone; she was about to close the door and get help when the emergency lights started to flicker and die.

It caught her attention and interest.

She knew that Middleton High wasn't exactly a paragon of safety, but there was no way the emergency lights had batteries that would fail this quickly. Something was wrong. The failures had started at the far end of the hall, but they were steadily making their way toward her, and thus the darkness approached. Tara had an deep, disturbing feeling that something was coming for her.

She felt a chill that she thought she was probably just imagining, slammed the door, and ran to join the others.

⁂

"Someone is missing and hurt!" shouted a blonde girl Josh didn't know that well. A cheerleader maybe?

Josh generally tried to help out where he could, but he had another reason for going to help this time: Kim was the only person he knew of who was missing. Going to the Spirit Week dance together was the closest they'd come to actually going on a date, but they both liked each other and Josh thought there was a connection there.

He definitely felt concerned for her in a way that was different than the concern he felt for others.

Josh reached the backstage area at the same time as more or less everyone else who had answered the girl's call which meant that he ended up in a crowd where the view was mostly of the backs of people's heads. The audience of the talent show had been mostly adult relatives of the performers, which meant most of them were tall enough to stop Josh from seeing much of anything.

He heard Barkin ask, "What's going on here, Ms.-" and knew something was very wrong. It wasn't like Barkin to stop in the middle of a sentence.

Josh pushed through the crowd a bit in hopes of seeing what had made Barkin-

And then he wanted to vomit.

Josh was pretty unshakable about a lot of things, but he wasn't good with blood. Barkin gave orders to some willing volunteers and they left to follow the trail of blood. Josh stayed behind.

Almost everyone else went back into the auditorium where the debate over whether it was better to stay in one place or bravely run away was still ongoing. That left him in the room with the blonde girl and Stoppable, who was unconscious. Maybe he could do something to help Stoppable. That would be _something_ , at least.

"Is he ok?" Josh asked the blonde girl.

"I don't know," she said, "There was no one else here."

Josh nodded. Whoever had been treating Stoppable must have been the one whose blood...

Josh pushed the thought from his head.

Someone was going to have to assess Stoppable's head wound. For some reason half of his head was bandaged even though his injury really, truly didn't call for that. He'd hit his head very hard, but it hadn't broken the skin and there should be nothing under all the bandaging but a lump. A large lump probably, but just a lump.

Josh was pretty sure he could handle a large lump, so he said, "Maybe we should take a-"

And the phone rang.

Of course the phone rang. By now there must be have been a dozen calls from frightened parents about an explosion at the school, and that was assuming that calls about the … missing person hadn't been made yet.

Hard line phones still worked when the power was out -something about drawing power from their own line or ... something- so of course the phone rang. Josh didn't actually want to be the one who answered but the blonde girl seemed intent on staying at Stoppable's side, so he picked up on the third ring.

"Ron!" the voice on the other end said.

"No, this is Josh Mankey," Josh said. "Ron's hurt."

"Not Ron too," the voice said. Then it asked, "What happened?"

"Who is this?" Josh asked.

"My name is Wade, I work with Kim and Ron."

Josh nodded to himself. Everyone who knew about Kim and Ron knew about Wade.

"Ron hurt himself doing a stunt for the talent show," Josh said. There was nothing Wade could do to help with that. What really interested Josh was something Wade had said. "What did you mean when you said 'Ron _too_ '?"

"Kim's missing," Wade said. "She tried to use the transportulator to get to the show but-"

"What's a transportulator?" Josh asked. In spite of the situation, he couldn't help but be amused by the name.

"It's a teleportation device that piggybacks its signal over the phone lines," Wade said, "but when she tried to get to you guys Kim just disappeared."

A connection was made in Josh's mind. "There was an explosion-"

"An explosion?"

"Yes," Josh said, "pay attention. There was an explosion, could that have been," Josh suddenly found it very hard to speak. Finally he managed to finish his question with, "Kim?"

"I'm looking into- no. If it were Kim I'd be getting at least some kind of signal from- that's not important," Wade said. "Based on the timing it probably was somehow related to what happened to Kim. I need Ron to-"

"Ron's unconscious!" Josh shouted. He hadn't meant to shout. It just came out that way. He felt bad about shouting because Wade had no way of knowing about the state Ron was in. Still, Ron wouldn't be helping. Josh said, "Tell me what to do."

"Ok," Wade said. Then the line went silent. It stayed silent. Josh was about to assume the connection had been lost and hang up when Wade spoke again. "You'll need to pick up equipment from Kim's locker. I'll contact you when you get there."

"Ok," Josh said, "I'm going but we've got more problems than just Ron and Kim, can you contact emergency services?"

"What happened?" Wade asked.

Josh looked at the blonde girl, "It's Kim and Ron's friend, Wade, can you tell him what happened?" he asked. "Something happened to Kim and I need to go."

She nodded and took the phone.

Josh heard her say, "Wade, it's Tara," as he left the backstage area.

The auditorium was about half empty when Josh crossed it, apparently there had been a fifty-fifty split, more or less, on the "stay or go" debate. It made it easier for Josh to run through it, then out of it, and the halls were clear as he headed in the direction of Kim's locker.

⁂

"Wade, it's Tara. I'm friends with Kim and Ron," Tara said into the phone.

"Can you tell me what's going on?" Wade asked. "I think Josh left some things out."

Tara told Wade everything that had happened. When she finished, she heard a flurry of typing and then Wade said, "Fire, police and medical services are already on the way because of the explosion, I'll make sure they know that there's a wild animal or something-"

"Or something," Tara said.

"-on the loose." Tara heard typing. "That's odd." More typing.

"What's odd?" Tara asked.

"There's more help headed your way than there should be."

There was an unexplained explosion, someone had been mauled and was missing, possibly dead, Ron was unconscious, Kim was missing -though apparently Josh was working on that- what could possibly be more help than they needed right now? So she asked, "What does that mean?"

"It looks like all of Middleton's emergency-" typing. "It's not just the high school." Wade said. More typing.

"What's not just the high school?" Tara asked, though she had a feeling she didn't really want to know the answer.

"Local 911 has been inundated by calls in your area," Wade said. "Animal attacks, strange sounds, unexplained blackouts" typing "Everything is centered on the high school."

"Great," Tara said. She didn't have any emotion left to give.

"Police are advising people to shelter in place," Wade said. "Tara, get yourself and Ron to a safe place and then barricade yourselves in."

"Wade," Tara said.

"I have to go." The line went dead.

"Damn it," Tara said.

Then she went to Ron again. "Wake up sleepyhead," she said in a way that she hoped hid her fear. The last thing she needed was for Ron to wake up in a panic.

⁂

It was strange being told the combination to a locker by a voice from inside of it, but all things considered it was one of the most normal things since the talent show went wrong.

As soon as Josh opened the locker, Wade said, "Josh, change of plans," over the video link on the computer Kim kept crammed in her locker. "Fact-finding and Kim-finding is on hold."

It took Josh a moment to process that.

"What do you mean finding Kim is on hold?" Josh asked.

"Something very bad is happening in your area right now," Wade said, "and everyone who left the talent show after the power outage -including you- is in danger."

"Go on," Josh said, trying to absorb the new information.

"The animal attack, which you didn't mention, isn't an isolated incident," Wade said. Josh felt a moment's guilt about not mentioning that, but only a moment. There was a lot going on and he didn't think it was wrong to be concerned that Kim might have been blown up. "They're happening all around you.

"I needed you to get everyone who's out in the open and send them somewhere safe," Wade said.

"If they're happening in the area shouldn't we get _out_ of the area?" Josh asked. "Also, in case you forgot where I was headed next, there was an explosion here. What about the boom?"

"The area has a two mile radius and is expanding," Wade said. "Everyone needs to get inside behind locked doors until we figure out what's going on. As for the boom, unless you've got a reason to think it wasn't an isolated incident, the ongoing animal attacks are a more immediate concern."

Josh thought about that for a moment, since when did Team Possible take a run and hide approach?

"I can't blame you if you don't want to take the risk of helping," Wade said, "but Kim is missing, Rufus weighs less than a paperback-"

"Seriously?" Josh asked.

"I know, with all he eats you'd think he'd weigh more," Wade said. "Anyway, that's Kim and Rufus. Ron is unconscious, and if she listened to me, then Tara is dragging Ron to a hiding place as we speak, so you're kind of the only person I'm in contact with on scene and I could really use some help rounding everyone up."

Josh thought it over and then said, "What do I do?"

"Obviously Kim took her mission gear with her on her mission, but there are still some useful things in Kim's locker. Outdated tech, backup gear, that sort of thing. You're going to need . . ."

⁂

Ron had woken up, but it was touch and go, and he was barely capable of supporting his own weight. He wasn't going to be going anywhere in a hurry. Still, Tara was preparing to get him out of the area when Barkin and the others who had followed the blood trail ran back into the room and slammed the door behind them.

"Block it with something!" Someone shouted.

Three adults were holding the door closed, and when something on the other side hit the door it looked like they might not be enough. There was a growling sound that, Tara estimated, came from something very large, and then there was the horrible sound of _something_ clawing at the metal door.

Two members of the party were clearly injured. All were afraid.

For a moment Tara was frozen with indecision. It was just a moment though. She'd long since learned a lesson that neither Kim nor Bonnie had managed: delegate.

"Do I help you or evacuate the others?"

"Evacuate the compromised premises!" Barkin shouted.

"Got it," Tara said. She turned her attention to Ron, "Sorry, we don't have time."

"Wha?" was all Ron said before she started to pick him up.

Ron was over Tara's shoulders and she was heading for the auditorium within a few seconds.

"Rufus?" Tara asked.

"Uh-huh?" The rodent asked.

"Keep an eye on him for me."

"Ok," Rufus said before he climbed onto Tara and then onto Ron.

When Tara was on the stage she made use of an asset gained from cheerleading: a shouting voice that made microphones and amplification unnecessary:

"Listen up everyone, it's not safe here and we have to move somewhere else."

"What's going on?" Bonnie asked.

"Not completely sure," Tara said, "but apparently the police are telling people to shelter in place so we just have to get to a safe place to shelter."

"Define safe," Someone said.

"Someone's been mauled here," Tara said, "there are a bunch of reports of wild animal attacks in the entire area, and no one knows what that explosion was."

All that remained was to determine what the safest place in the school was. Tara was in favor this debate taking place on the move, and led by example.

When not everyone chose to follow her example she added, "Also, one of the killer beasts is in the process of breaking down a door to get into the backstage area."

Everyone looked at the curtain that separated backstage from on stage. A moment later everyone started to exit the auditorium.

⁂

Josh had made contact with just five groups so far. Admittedly some of them were pretty large, but they were all stragglers who'd gotten turned around in the high school's halls. He wasn't sure how much of a difference he was really making. Every time he'd made contact he'd given them directions from Wade that, hopefully, would lead to them joining up with Tara's group.

Most of the work of finding the people had been done with a prototype Kimmunicator which showed him human heat signatures, represented by red dots, superimposed on a map of the school.

Wade's voice crackled in, Josh guessed that the crackling was part of why this particular Kimmunicator was filed under "abandoned prototype" rather than "back up; early model."

Wade said, "Josh, I've done some work toward adapting the system we're using to locate other people to also show . . . non-human heat signatures."

"Non-human?" Josh asked. He probably didn't want to know. Don't think about blood.

"It seems impossible, but I'm picking up things that are significantly colder than the ambient temperature and _not heating up_. Ordinary cold blooded creatures would slowly warm or cool to room temperature, but these things . . . it's like someone reversed the polarity on warm blooded metabolism."

"You do realize that what you just said makes no sense and doesn't really mean anything, right?" Josh asked. He'd taken biology class, he'd paid attention to the part about thermoregulation.

"It always worked with Kim and Ron," Wade said. There was a short pause then, " _Anyway_ , I'm sending updated protocols to your device. Avoid the blue dots."

There was a bit of static, then several blue dots appeared on his map in addition to the red dots that had been there before.

One of them was close and getting closer.

"Wade, one of the blue dots-"

"Run!"

Josh did.

"I'm sorry! I didn't notice that one," Wade said quickly as Josh ran down a hall. "I'm going to go radio silent and then see if I can find a way to lure it away from you. Find a place to hide, Josh."

A moment later he didn't have to place his faith in a blue dot on an electronic map. A crash behind him had him turn to look at a mass of black fur, he didn't make out much of anything about the shape or size, but he did note the pristine white _teeth_.

Before he saw it he didn't think he could run any faster, after he saw it he was running faster without trying or indeed thinking about it.

A random, completely unfounded, downright Ron-like, probably-bad idea popped into Josh's head and he headed for the cafeteria.

⁂

Tara surveyed, for what seemed to be the thousandth time, the people she was with.

Barkin and his group had caught up to them after doing what they could to seal the backstage door and then the most direct doors out of the auditorium. Barkin had advised that they seek out a half-forgotten fallout shelter under the gym building. It was the best suggestion anyone had had so far. That just meant getting through the halls from the auditorium to the exit, across open space to the gym, and from there to the shelter.

If the auditorium hadn't recently been refurbished, of course, they'd have held the talent show in the gym and thus be there already. Sometimes even good things turned out to be bad things.

Tara focused on the task in front of her. She was carrying Ron to a place he'd hopefully be safe and shepherding these people to the same place. Wade and Josh had both sent more people her way, and their group had grown in size.

Now they had perhaps as much as a three quarters of the people who attended the talent show.

They just had to make it somewhere safe.

The smell of blood coming off Barkin's group and some of the newcomers wouldn't make things easy, though and they'd already had to turn around several times to avoid the sounds of large animals.

⁂

Josh made it into the cafeteria only a few seconds ahead of his pursuer and vaulted over the counter. Now he put all of his hopes in mystery meat. No self-respecting predator would ever think to touch stuff, and hopefully its smell would disguise his own.

He tried to slow his breathing, but had no luck.

Then he heard the doors forced open with a crash.

He wasn't sure if he could breathe now even if he'd wanted to.

It followed his scent, or perhaps just intuition, to where he jumped over the counter, but then Josh heard the footfalls stop. There was sniffing, just over the counter, and only mystery meat between Josh and those shiny white teeth.

⁂

 **2004 – Unknown**

"It really does work like a phone," Kim said. She dialed the number for Middleton high school back in the US. There was a ring, then a high tone, then a trilling tone, and the world was gone.

When Kim hit the ground she was moving forward fast, even though a moment ago she'd been standing still.

The jagged ground scraped her all over before she came to a stop.

"Dementor must not have ironed all the bugs out," Kim said as she got to her feet. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized that she was in a cavern of some sort. Some other part of Drakken's lair?

If it was, it was a part he hadn't been using. There was no sign of human activity anywhere.

The fact that she could see was oddly disconcerting considering that there was also no sign of any light source. The stone offered no clues. It seemed to be an nondescript flat gray, but it could simply be that the lighting was too dim for her color vision to be working.

The "room" she found herself in had several tunnels leading out of it implying it was part of a larger network of underground caves, but it offered no evidence of how the network had been formed. It showed no signs of being carved by erosion, there were no signs of mineral deposits being laid down, nothing looked cut or broken, if a weaker or more water soluble type of earth had been washed out to make the cave, it had left no evidence behind.

Knowing from experience that _up_ was usually a good way to go, she picked the tunnel that most looked like it could lead there.

Drakken had confiscated her Kimmunicator and she hadn't actually stopped to get it back, she'd dropped the ring communicator in the not-actually-bottomless "bottomless" pit when the shark had smacked her in the face with its tail. Wade probably had her chipped, just like Ron, but that didn't mean _she_ could contact _him_.

She was on her own for now.

⁂

Kim had been going so long with no sounds but her own footsteps and breathing that at first she wasn't sure whether the new sounds were incredibly faint real sounds, or her imagination trying to give her the chance of pace she so desperately wanted. She did her best to find out.

As she drew nearer she was sure that there was something walking through the tunnels and caverns. Unfortunately she was also sure that it wasn't human. The soft footfalls weren't in the right rhythm. The breathing was all wrong.

She almost lost the sound after an echo caused her to take the wrong turn, but when she got back on track she was closer than ever. It was definitely an animal. A big one, she thought. But a big one with soft feet.

Not that Kim expected to find something with hooves in a cave, caves tended to be hostile to hooved animals, but she was putting together whatever information she could pull from what she was hearing and right now it said large animal with soft feet.

She finally caught up and found herself peering around a corner at a giant mass of black fur. It was hard to make out in the dim lighting, but the tail was what allowed her to figure it out. There were only so many things that had a tail like that. It was a black dog, but too big to be a normal dog while, at the same time, much smaller than she'd expect a super-villain's pet project to be.

It either didn't notice her, or didn't care. Since it seemed to know where it was going Kim decided to follow it. Maybe it knew the way out of this place.

In the process she was able to get a better sense of what it looked like as she glimpsed new angles whenever it turned. Significantly large than a Saint Bernard, shaped like a wolf, soot black fur, bone white teeth.

The dog she'd been following joined up with another that was just like it. Same breed? Same litter? Whatever the case the first dog fell in beside the new one and they continued to wherever they were going.

For what she estimated to be fifteen minutes Kim was following the two dogs. Then another joined. Later another, and another. Each time one joined in with the others they sped up a bit.

By the time there were dozens of large, unkempt, nearly identical dogs Kim was sure that someone had bred or cloned a dog army. At last things were making sense. While she had no idea whose lair she was in, she could easily face off against whatever villain was thrown at her.

All she had to do was follow the dogs to wherever they were going, then there'd be a gloating super-villain who would explain everything.

Plus, the dogs seemed to be doing a good job of moving in a generally upward direction and, unlike her, they never ran into a dead end.

⁂

Kim slipped.

It barely made a noise maybe- Kim cursed canine hearing; at least ten of the dogs had broken off from the group and were coming her way

Where before Kim had had a goal and direction -get out, go up- now Kim wasn't thinking ahead at all. Every move she made was strictly in the moment. Would a zig or a zag be better at shaking her pursuers? Jumps down broke line of sight more quickly than running on level ground so soon she was deeper than where she'd started.

⁂

Kim finally thought she'd lost the last of the dogs, but she was now thoroughly lost. She was also exhausted. What little map she'd created in her head was useless now, she had no idea where she'd been and where she hadn't.

Worse, some of the places she'd jumped down were ones where she was pretty sure that she couldn't get back up again. Drakken had confiscated her grappler too.

She just had to try to get the lay of the land from scratch. Again.

⁂

Kim followed a light, but all it led her to was a cavern with glowing threadlike growths spider-webbing around it. Kim knew that the correct term was "mycelium" but she always thought of them as "mushroom roots". They looked like roots, they were connected to mushrooms (sometimes) so "mushroom roots" made sense to her.

How deep did they go? Could she be near the surface?

There was no obvious way up to find out. A detailed search of the nearby parts of the cave system did yield fruit, though not of the sort she was looking for.

"Honey Fungus," Kim said to the empty air. The tightly packed honey colored mushrooms were things she remembered from her days as a scout.

"You're a plant pathogen," Kim said to the mushrooms, "where are the plants?"

The soil pile they were growing from could be wood that had rotted beyond all recognition, but if it were it would have had to get in there somehow, and she wasn't seeing any sign that a way out of the caves was nearby.

She ate some of the mushrooms, knowing they were edible.

⁂

Despite her best efforts Kim seemed to be going deeper into the caves, and the ecology made no sense. An albino salamander hurried to hide from her on a wall covered with oyster mushrooms. They grew on trees, not stone. They weren't lichen, and even if they had been, lichen needed sunlight to survive.

Green light that led her into another chamber was a tightly packed clump of bioluminescent mushrooms, again tree mushrooms, again no wood in evidence.

It was possible, if unlikely, that the wood was always hidden by the mushrooms themselves, but if so, where did the wood come from?

If she was getting deeper then wouldn't that mean she was getting farther away from things the mushrooms could feed on?

Unless the cave were upside-down. She wouldn't put it past some of the villains she knew to make a lair where the gravity was somehow reversed.

The next big surprise was a cave of dead moths. Thin white tendrils extending in all directions from their corpses.

Kim really, really did not like these caverns. She'd been in various cave systems in her life and not once, before this one, had one tried to shock her by throwing a room full of dead insects with God knew what growing out of them.

Where had the moths come from? She hadn't bumped into any before. For there to be dead moths there must logically have been live moths and it didn't seem likely that they would all have died in the exact same place: this particular cave.

She moved on. Quickly.

Soon she had soil beneath her feet. That had to be a good sign, right? Soil didn't just come out of nowhere, a whole host of natural processes went into creating it.

Also, some live moths.

⁂

At first it had been faint sounds, but she followed them and the sounds resolved into words. Someone talking, at length, to him or herself. Standard super-villain stuff. For the first time since she lost the dogs, she was comfortably in the presence of something that made sense.

She approached while sticking to the shadows.

Finally she was able to make out the words.

"The dogs go first like always, but the dogs haven't gone for ages. The way they're going it must be a big one, first in centuries and big, big like never before. Doggies and darkness go first, clear the way. Then the unseen, and finally the population gets to move," the voice said.

Even though she hadn't heard that much yet, Kim was already prepared to reach two conclusions. One: the voice was female; two: she wasn't going to get anything out of it. Whoever it was was simply too far beyond sense.

"The people move, but not me, not me, gone ages ago. Should be unseen myself, so they say. So they say. They say, but I won't settle for that. No, no. Why would I go there. Ought to be a person, I should. Why would I give up that? No, I just have to find- Hello there."

Kim couldn't see the source of the voice yet, but somehow she was convinced that it was talking to her.

"Why don't you come out, young one? Let me see you."

That was quite coherent. Maybe, just maybe, Kim could get answers.

"Don't be afraid," the voice said, "I won't harm a hair on your head."

Kim continued down the tunnel she was in and soon came to the entrance to one of the caverns.

"Why I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt that lovely body of yours."

Ferociously creepy, but a chance at answers. Kim walked into the cavern.

Water pooled in the far end of the cavern, it looked like some kind of underground stream must have bumped into a depression here or something. On the near side was what might be an improvised dwelling for one or two people, it was hard to tell. Nearer still was the source of the voice.

"Not something so fresh. No, no," the owner of the voice said. She was an adult dressed in old clothes. Like Jamestown-reenactment old. She was also somewhat transparent.

"Such a fresh, warm body, still juicy, wouldn't want to harm it in the least," she said.

Slim possibility of a hologram, but probably a ghost. Kim hadn't dealt with a ghost before, but she'd seen a fair amount of magic.

"I'd never harm a body such as yours, what with there being so little chance of having another so fresh sent to me."

Very creepy ghost.

"Where am I?" Kim asked.

"Why the After, deary," the ghost said. "All those restrictions placed on you before are gone now. Wouldn't you like to get out of that confining thing and take a look around?"

"What thing?" Kim asked.

"That delightfully fresh body of yours; doesn't it feel like a straight jacket?"

Very, very creepy ghost.

"It places so many limits on you. Don't you want to fly?" the ghost started to move towards Kim. "I promise I'll take good care of it while you're gone. Not harm a single hair on its juicy scalp. I'd never have that."

Kim started walking backward, maintaining the distance between herself and the ghost.

"I think I'll be keeping my body on," Kim said. "If you could just tell me the way out of here."

"Oh, you don't want to go that way," the ghost said, "hairy stinky dogs there. Doggies always go first. They can smell the air from the living world. Drawn to it, they are."

"Just the same," Kim said, "I think I'll be going now."

"That's not nice," the ghost said. "Didn't anyone ever teach you to share?"

"Definitely going," Kim said.

"The fastest way is to fly, but you can't take that fresh body of yours with you when you fly," the ghost said. "So if you really want to go, just fly away and I'll keep the body safe."

Possibly the most coherent thing the ghost had said since, "Let me see you." Definitely the most disturbing.

"Going," Kim said with what she hoped was finality. Then she ran.

Today was, apparently, a day for running.

⁂

Kim felt that she was almost spent. She didn't have another run in her. The ghost had been hard to shake. She had to be more stealthy. So when she finally saw a sign of civilization, she was in full creeping mode.

By now there were other signs of life. Flies buzzing, a hideous smell like meat was rotting, wood mushrooms growing from actual wood. And it was the wood that interested Kim most of all because it was in the form of a building.

It seemed to be a bar, more or less. An old, decrepit, decaying, disgusting version of a saloon. The rot was most definitely not a dry rot.

Light came through the windows and the door, sounds of indistinct chatter drifted out, and Kim definitely wanted to see who was in there before they saw her.

Kim crept to a window and peered inside. What she saw made her want to retch. They were standing and sitting around, drinking and talking like ordinary people, but they were so very clearly dead.

Putrid decaying corpses. Rotting flesh hanging from bone. They wore moldy tattered clothes on the verge of simply falling apart.

She strained her ears and listened to the conversation nearest her. Three of them around a table, all male.

"This is the biggest opportunity in centuries," one said, "maybe more."

"I'll believe it when these eyes see sunlight again," a second said. Kim thought that he might have been blonde, but she wasn't even sure what she was seeing was actual hair. "Until then it's just more talk."

"The first hounds have already gone through," the first said, clearly enthusiastic. "Word is they're meeting no resistance."

"How could there be resistance?" the third chimed in. "They've kept us all locked up down here for so long they hardly remember we exist, much less how to fight us."

Was that possible? Was it like with wildfires? Could it be that having no "controlled burns" of fighting these things in recorded history meant that the world was unprepared for them now?

Kim shook her head. She'd stop them now. She could do anything.

"Dogs and darkness have an easy time making it to the other side-" the second said.

"And they'll pave the way for _us_ ," the third countered.

"I'll believe it when-" the second said again.

"We'll know soon enough," the first said. "The important thing is that if we do get the chance, we can't afford to waste this opportunity."

"I'm just glad it didn't open in _their_ territory again," the third said.

 _Whose_ territory?

"Life lovers," the second spat.

"As it was, so it shall be," the first said, raising a glass. "It was our world before and it will be our world again."

"I'll drink to that," the third said.

"I'll drink," the second said.

Kim didn't want to watch that display and crept away from the building.

x  
x x  
x x x  
x x  
x

Endnotes:

If you don't remember the episode with the transportulator, it's _Hidden Talent_. While that episode is midway through Season 2, it's important to remember how much hasn't happened:

 _Blush_ , which is described as Kim and Josh's first date hasn't happened. That happens to be the first time after the early parts of Crush where Ron shows any distaste for Josh, so at this point Ron and Josh are on good terms with each other and probably planning to go trick-or-treating together again this year (it's Halloween 2029, not yet Halloween 2004, time travel and all that.) Josh and Tara have never been shown together yet.

 _Exchange_ hasn't happened so Ron doesn't know much about the monkey magic yet. In fact, given that he seemed to think destroying the idols at the end of _Monkey Fist Strikes_ "pulled the plug", he probably doesn't know he still has it yet.

Ron has never been evil, but he has built a semi-functional device of doom (in _Naked Genius_.) Felix is around, I don't know if he'll be showing up though.

Jacob, no last name, is an original character of mine who debuted in original, not fan, fiction but this will be his longest appearance to date.

This is story was originally to be an entry in Stormchaser90's Heebie Jeebie Hullabaloo Halloween Story Contest, but computer problems and sickness meant it did not get finished on time.

This is a revision because the original was an increasingly desperate and frantic exercise in speed writing. I tried to keep the original versions of the 3+ chapters that had been written as a sort of appendix at the end, but the way fanfiction dot net works just makes it massively impracticable. If you want the original pre-revision version, then put "Stealing Commas" "Life After" into google and the first result should be an index of current installments, pre-revision posts, meta posts, and even a preview or two.

It's probably a good thing I failed to make the cut because everything would have been condensed way too much if I'd finished it in a month.


	2. I-2: Dying Light

[Shin Possible is the creation of Blackbird, used with permission.]

 **Part I**  
 **Chapter 2: Dying light**

 **O**  
 **X O**  
 **⁂** \+ **⁂**  
 **⁂** **⁂** **⁂** **⁂**  
 **⁂** \+ + + **⁂  
** **⁂** **⁂** \+ + **⁂ ⁂  
** **⁂** \+ **⁂** \+ **⁂** \+ **⁂  
** **⁂ ⁂** **⁂** **⁂** **⁂ ⁂ ⁂** **⁂**

 **2029 – Earth**

They were fighting corpses. It was the single most disgusting thing Jacob had ever done. Eating food from dumpsters featured in many fond memories of childhood. Wearing the same clothes for months without washing them because you've only got one set? Not that bad.

Crawling through a sewer as part of a prison break? Very disgusting, but not on this level.

The corpses weren't well preserved at all. Exposed bone, exposed brain, blood that was disgustingly not like the blood of the living. The gross decomposition that you'd expect. There was some variation between species because for the most part only the humans had been embalmed, and even then not all of them. Perhaps not even most.

A very dead dachshund tried to jump and bite his thigh. Jacob kicked it away.

"We can't keep this up," he said to Shin.

She was doubtless having an easier time, since they seemed to fear fire. He was keeping a ball of Shin's plasma in his left hand, but he couldn't wield it the way Shin could.

Also that meant he had to keep his hand largely open, he couldn't even make a fist on his left side. That limited combat options.

Things were not good.

"We'll make for that grove and try to lose them in the ... trees," Shin said.

Jacob didn't see any trees so he asked, "What trees?"

Shin made an, "Ugh," sound, and then said, "The giant orange mushrooms," after a pause.

Jacob looked around a bit, and then said, "Got it."

⁂

"Now?" Jacob asked as they ran through the mushrooms.

"Don't have enough of a lead yet," Shin said. "In a second."

"I thought zombies were supposed to be slow," Jacob said.

"They're not zombies," Shin said. "Set me up."

Jacob got in position to let his hands act as a springboard for Shin and she vaulted onto one of the mushrooms. A moment later she helped him up.

The dead things reached where they had been.

⁂

Jacob was laying on his back looking up at the sky.

They hadn't heard noises below them for a while. The army of the dead seemed to have dispersed.

It hadn't taken that long, really. Though shadows were long, the sun had yet to set.

Jacob sighed and then spoke. "Given that it took them time to build up a swarm, they're obviously not that densely populated. If we use stealth we might be safe from them."

"Yup," Shin said.

"You said they weren't zombies," Jacob said.

"Notice how they didn't try to eat us?" Shin asked.

"So I guess Ishtar didn't knock down the gates of the underworld."

"What?"

"Never mind," Jacob said.

"Oh," Shin said in a way that made Jacob think she might actually know what he'd been talking about. " _Epic of Gilgamesh_ reference."

"Good catch," Jacob said, honestly surprised she'd gotten it.

"How do you know _The Epic of Gilgamesh_?" Shin asked.

"The internet, books, misspent youth, the fact the prison you sent me to had a good library, oral tradition -take your pick," Jacob said to her.

"I-" This caused Jacob to actually get up enough to look at her. Shin usually didn't hesitate like that.

"I'm sorry about prison," Shin said. "I didn't know they'd try you as an adult."

 _Because juvie would have been so much better_ , Jacob thought.

Jacob thought about Shin's apology for a bit before replying with, "Sorry about ruining your Halloween."

"Thanks," Shin said. "We'd better scout a bit before we lose the sun."

⁂

Jacob looked around at the rotted out interior of what was once a building. If he tried -hard- he could imagine that there were aisles once, a counter, the signifiers of business being done. He could imagine it, but that imagination was forced on him because there wasn't much non-imaginary stuff to base such imaginings on.

True, it was better preserved than a lot of the former buildings they'd seen, but that didn't mean much.

Finally he asked, "You're sure this used to be an electronics store?"

"Of course I'm not sure," Shin said. "I said that I think this was one. I didn't memorize a map of every business in the city just because I happened to have a single mission here."

Jacob looked up and down what he thought were once the aisles. There just wasn't anything left. Nothing that stood out. Nothing that grabbed the eye. Nothing that said, "Someone made me."

There was only -an admittedly small slice of- nature. Fungus only, thankfully; none of the noxious mold. But mushrooms and their many-shaped multicolored ilk were not what they were going to need to have any hope of returning to the world they knew, or rather returning the world they knew to existence and thus to them.

And all Jacob was getting out of looking was fungus. Mushrooms, foldy things that seemed to be attempting to represent the hyperbolic plane in the normal Euclidean world, sprouts with no . . . mushroom-thing on top -like mushrooms that decided to be sharp- ones that were packed close together, ones that imitated trees, ones that reached skyward or pushed sideways.

But no technology.

"Well there's nothing we can use here," Jacob said. Something caught his eye and he knelt down to pick it up from among the yellow fungus that was growing like a carpet of grass in this section of the former store. It was metal, iron containing metal, but beyond that it was impossible to diagnose. It was all rust on the outside and no real substance.

"Can't even tell for sure what they sold here," Jacob said, standing back up. "If it was even a store."

⁂

Shin checked her pockets and pouches.

Communicator, grappling gun, multispectrum specs, music player she hardly ever used for actual playing that she'd gotten two Christmases ago, antiquated MP3 player with no wi-fi accesss that she did use because, as much as she liked Wade, she didn't like her mother's best friend having access to her play-lists, compact -mom insisted that anyone facing off against "laser guns", which seldom actually used real lasers, needed to have a compact- stick of chewing gum, ballpoint pen, rebreather.

She checked her communicator, again. No signal from anywhere. Could be that being so close to a major magical ritual scrambled it, magic did have a habit of doing unpleasant things to her electronics, could be that with 25 years worth of divergence no one in this timeline was using the frequencies her gear was meant to pick up, or it could be that no one was transmitting anything.

"Uncle" Wade would probably never forgive her if she gave a villain his technology and told him to "go wild" but if they didn't find something Jacob could work with soon Shin was considering doing just that.

There wasn't a lot to be said for the rebreather or the compact that could redirect energy bolts, at least she didn't think there was, but maybe Jacob could do something with the technology used to make the communicator or multispectrum specs. Certainly the communicator had a lot of sensors built right in and the specs would add even more.

Probably not enough tech to make a time machine with, but maybe enough to find other people. There had to be someone else.

Still, hope wasn't lost just yet. She could wait on sharing her stuff. He wasn't gutting his stuff.

They just needed to get some idea of what they were facing. What had happened, what they'd need to do to set things right

⁂

Shin was doing some sort of introspective Shin-thing in front of one of the buildings they'd thought might be worth searching. They'd been wrong, it had been a bust, just like everything else.

Not that they'd had much time, but the shadows were getting longer, the sun getting lower, and god only knew what kind of night vision dead people had.

Maybe it was appropriately bad. That would be nice. More likely, considering their luck today, it was actually very, very good.

They shouldn't linger, but a closer look revealed Shin to be taking an inventory. That was actually a good idea.

Jacob hadn't come to work equipped for much today. Flashlight, plasma catchers, the thing he'd been making out of cellphones as a means of maintaining his sanity while waiting, screwdrivers, soldering tools, a piece of circuit board he found pretty, _Audel's Machinist's and Tool Maker's Handy Book_ , a small monocular, random odds and ends, so forth. There had been candy corn, but he'd used the supply before Shin had even shown up.

Not a good sign given their total inability to find anything usable in this world.

But the exploration hadn't been without benefits. The upper floors of the buildings were gone, the floors around ground level reduced to hollow mounds at best. Basements were toxic mold pits but if the preservation pattern persisted below ground level then maybe -if they could make gas masks or something- they might find things that worked in those basements.

Certainly the one they'd started in had been the best preserved place they'd seen and Jacob was coming to believe that it being the best preserved had nothing to do with the fact the ritual had taken place there and everything to do with the fact that they wouldn't willingly venture into air that foul to see other, equally well preserved, basements.

So basements might be the way forward.

Not today though, today they needed to find a place to hole up for the night. Jacob took another look around and saw something that hadn't been there before: shapes like people and perhaps a dog or wolf or some such. The light was bad, and his eyes were a bit tired, but he was pretty sure that they didn't number among the living.

Time to get Shin. Time to do it quietly and without any sudden movements. As the beings drew closer he was more and more sure that they were dead.

⁂

Jacob came toward her and said, "We have to hide," while indicating some dead things headed their way.

Shin looked around; there were plenty of places and no real way to determine which was best. She pointed to a nearby mushroom grove, and said "Orange ones served us well last time."

Quickly and quietly they slipped into the grove of massive orange mushrooms. Shin and Jacob watched from behind mushroom stalks as the dead, six dead people and one dead canine, walked by. When Shin thought they were safe, she returned to what she'd been thinking about before. She'd share her resources with Jacob -let him butcher them to make whatever needed making- if it came to that.

But first they needed some idea of what was going on, so she said to Jacob, "We need to get the lay of the land."

Jacob was his usual helpful self and responded with, "Civilization collapsed, decay has been turned up to an absurd degree, and we're hiding from demons in a grove of bright orange mushrooms."

Shin corrected, "They're not demons," without even thinking about it.

"Ok, so they're not demons and they're not zombies," Jacob said. "Care to share what they are?"

Shin took a bit of joy in Jacob's frustration, but just a bit. She was supposed to be a the good one after all. "They're draugar," she said.

"Oh, that explains everything," Jacob said with what Shin recognized as his maximum sarcasm.

"They're spirits who refused to abandon their earthly bodies in spite of being dead, usually it requires a nigh impossibly massive feat of will and also utter contempt for the natural order of life and death -or growth and decay, I was never clear on that point- and for whatever reason it tends to be the worst aspects of a person that manage to return to and reanimate the body."

In fact, some sources suggested that anyone who was sufficiently unpleasant was a potential candidate, meaning that having bad aspects made the odds of returning to one's body to life even more likely. But this was graded on a curve. More likely than most to come back from the dead was still pretty unlikely.

Shin sighed. "Whatever Mancer changed," She said, "he obviously made it a lot easier for stubborn spirits to reanimate their corpses."

"And they attacked us because?"

"Don't know," Shin said. Then she shrugged. It was a good question, but one she didn't have the answer to. So she decided to engage in rampant speculation, "Maybe these ones are territorial, maybe they've had bad experiences with the living before and wanted to get preemptive."

"So maybe they swarmed us and tried to kill us because we were trespassing and they wanted us off their lawn," Jacob said. "Oh, yay."

"It's not important _why_ , what matters is _how_ ," Shin said. "we need to find out what happened after Mancer changed time."

"Well everything I might make a time viewer out of rusted, rotted, corroded, eroded, imploded, collapsed, or decayed so-"

"I know," Shin said. "Let's hold a seance."

"Because that makes sense," Jacob said.

"It does!" Shin insisted. "We could get living witnesses to the altered timeline."

"Your proposed living witnesses are dead," Jacob said.

"You know what I mean," Shin said.

"Your girlfriend is magic," Jacob said. "You, not so much."

"I'm not talking magic," Shin said. "Today is the first day of Allhallowtide,"

"So we put on costumes so the demons can't get us," Jacob said, and Shin caught his total lack of interest.

"So it's one of three days when the border between life and afterlife is extremely slim. Tomorrow is-"

"All Saints' Day," Jacob said. "Know any saints?"

"No, but-"

"Maybe we could get Saint Francis of 'I talk to birds' or Saint Christopher of 'Doesn't my story remind you of the thing with Jason, Hera, and the river?'"

"The day _after_ All Saints' Day," Shin said, starting to get angry, "Is All Souls Day. Any dead people at all."

"And yet I can't seem to recall any cases of non-magic people summoning ghosts on all souls day," Jacob said.

"Given that dead people are walking around," Shin said, "I think that the usual barriers are a lot more porous than usual, add to that the dip on All Souls day, plus the fact that I've picked up some stuff from Kieran-"

"I wish she were here instead of you," Jacob said which threw Shin for a moment, to Jacob Kieran was "Shin's girlfriend", he never even used her name. Why would he- "She'd have a better plan."

Shin snapped, "Do you have a better idea?"

"I hate you sometimes," Jacob said with annoying calm.

"Just sometimes?" Shin asked her anger evaporating as she got ready for banter.

"There's a reason we only ever team up when the fate of the world is at stake," Jacob said. Then he pulled an apple from his pocket and was about to take a bite out of it.

"Don't!" Shin said as loudly as she thought she could get away with without giving away their position to anyone or, more importantly, any _thing_ that might wish them harm.

"I'm hungry," Jacob said.

"It's not just the barrier between this world and the afterlife that's weak at this time of year," Shin said. "It's also between here and the fae world."

"So?" Jacob asked.

"Their favorite food: apples," Shin said. "You bite into that thing, they smell it, and we might have to deal with them too."

Jacob shook his head, "Isn't bobbing for apples something you rich kids do on Halloween?"

"Why is it that everything with you ends up being a class issue?" Shin asked. She was sick of having the fact she wasn't born poor held against her.

"Why is everything with you a moral issue?" Jacob shot back. "Good and bad, black and white, dark and light, light and..." Jacob paused, and -Shin noted with a tiny bit of triumphalism- put the apple back in his pocket without biting it, "shadow."

The way he said that last word bothered Shin.

"Into the open," he said, rushing out of the mushroom grove himself. "Now!"

Shin followed and asked, "What is it?" once she was clear.

"Look at a shadow, any shadow, then look at the light source," Jacob said, pointing to the setting sun. "Tell me what's wrong."

At first there didn't seem to be anything off to Shin. But the closer she looked the more she was sure that the shadows were too dark and too large. Then she realized that some of them seemed to be consciously stretching out toward them.

"They're alive," Shin said.

"How much you want to bet they're not friendly?" Jacob asked.

"No bet," Shin said. "Light up?"

"They'll see us," Jacob said, but got out his palm-light anyway.

Shin knew Jacob wasn't talking about the shadows, which seemed to already sense them . The draugar they'd been avoiding would be sure to see them if they were the only light sources around, but if they didn't make light then they would have no way to keep back the shadows. So they'd need to go where the draugar weren't.

"Out of the city?" she asked. Jacob nodded. "Run!"

Shin lit her hands, bright not hot, she saw the beam of Jacob's light, and the two of them ran in the direction that seemed like it would take them outside of the city limits most quickly.

⁂ **  
**

 **2004 - Earth**

Josh heard the thing pacing back and forth on the other side of the counter. Either it had lost him and was sticking near the place where it lost the trail, or it knew where he'd gone but had serious reservations about coming closer to the mystery meat.

Then Josh heard a phone ring. Maybe that was Wade trying to get its attention. Please, please, _please_ let it be drawn away by the sound of the phone.

The pacing stopped. Then, when it started moving again, the footfalls were uncertain, assuming it wasn't just wishful thinking on Josh's part, as if the thing weren't sure whether to continue after Josh or investigate the new noise.

Finally Josh heard the thing walk from the cafeteria, whatever remained of the doors wasn't swinging well on the hinges based on grinding sound produced when the thing left. When the grinding of the hinges stopped, Josh could breathe again.

For a while Josh did nothing but sit there, still hiding behind the counter, catching his breath. Then the prototype Kimmuniucator, which he'd set on the floor to his right, crackled to life again.

"Josh," came Wade's voice. "You should be clear to move now."

"I'm gonna need a moment," Josh said, his body was only now beginning to relax and doing so slowly.

"Ok, it's past time I checked in with Tara's group anyway," Wade said. "Push the hole that looks like a button belongs over it when you're ready to move again."

Josh nodded. After a moment he realized that accomplished little, since the Kimmuncator was still on the ground, and not pointed in a direction where Wade would be able to see his head. So Josh said, "Ok."

⁂

Tara found herding an auditorium full of people -or about three fourths of that, as the case may be- through the halls to be much more difficult than she would have expected.

The school wasn't that big so there weren't too many halls she had to herd the people through. But there were the animals to avoid so it meant keeping them all quiet, not walking too fast, definitely not running, occasionally dumping a lot of the people in a classroom or three so the amount of space they took up in the hall would shrink to something small enough to avoid detection, and repeatedly having to turn around when they were almost to their destination. The fact that the last leg of the journey would be in the open wasn't very appealing, but they were having a hard enough time just getting to an exit near the gym without an animal sighting turning them back.

Also, Ron was getting heavy on her shoulders.

There were some improvements since they first set out. Barkin had taken point, which was a very Barkin thing to do, leaving her to only have to worry about keeping the rear of the group under control. Barkin had also given them direction.

But then there were some downsides too. Barkin's group had been bloodied, as had some of the groups Wade and Josh had sent her way. She put those who smelled of blood in the middle, hoping that those ahead of and behind them would mask their smell with that of a large mass of people who didn't want to be there. Since that was the smell of a school, and they were in a school, it was the closest thing to camouflage she could manage.

A phone near her started to ring. Tara carefully set down Ron, when the phone call was over she'd see if he was ready to walk on his own. Until then he could sit with Rufus. The naked mole rat would watch over Ron while Tara was occupied.

Someone else, a senior maybe, reached the phone first, picked up, and handed the receiver to Tara.

"Wade, I presume," Tara said.

"Yeah, it's me." Wade said.

"I don't like it when people hang up on me," Tara said. She didn't have it in her right now to muster the outrage she thought it deserved. She'd become emotionally exhausted ages ago.

Wade was defensive, "I'm trying to save as many people as I can."

"So am I," Tara said, "but if you want me to have faith that you focusing your attentions elsewhere will end up saving more people then I'd like at least some faith sent my way over whether or not there's person-saving value in continuing the conversation."

"Ok," Wade said.

"Especially since you can apparently contact me whenever you want," Tara said, "while I can't contact you."

Tara heard typing.

"Cell reception in your area is unharmed," Wade said. "Do you have a phone?"

Once Tara had Wade's number in her phone's memory, Tara asked, "So what's the situation?"

"I'm able to track the creatures now," Wade said. "You're safe at the moment. I've been drawing them away from people by making calls to empty areas, but I think they're already realizing that a ringing phone doesn't mean food.

"Most of the ones that have appeared have actually ignored the school and moved outward," Wade. "There are only about a half a dozen on school grounds."

"That's very comforting," Tara said. She hoped the sarcasm made it to Wade.

"Do you have anyone who's gotten a good look at one?" Wade asked.

"Several," Tara said, "but right now the group is moving on. I'll call back when I've caught up to one."

"How's Ron?" Wade asked.

"I'm about to check," Tara said, "Bye Wade."

Tara hung up without waiting to see if he had anything else to say.

She walked to Ron, squatted down to be eye to eye with him, and asked, "You ok?"

"My head feels like Shego punched me," Ron said.

"That tends to happen when you bash it into a stack of cinder-blocks," Tara said.

"The cinder-blocks were supposed to break," Ron said.

"They did," Tara said. "Right after you did."

After a pause Tara asked, "Can you walk, or do I have to carry you again?"

"I think I can walk," Ron said.

⁂

Four times Josh had thought he was ready only to find himself unable to actually pick up the Kimmunicator and contact Wade. On the fifth time, though, he managed it.

"Wade, I'm ready to move," Josh said. "What can I do?"

"Let me- ok, there are only two isolated groups still in the area," Wade said. "Both are too far from Tara's group for me to feel comfortable just giving them directions."

"Ok," Josh said.

"If you can join one, bring it to the other, and then bring both to Tara," Wade said, "that's probably as much of a difference as you can make right now. With the Kimmuicator to guide you, you should be able to steer clear of the animals."

"Right," Josh said. It wasn't, exactly, that he didn't believe it, it was more that he didn't like trusting his life, or the lives of others, to something that _should_ be possible.

"I'm doing what I can to keep the animals away from everyone," Wade said, "but there's only so much I can do from here."

Josh looked at the map on the Kimmunicator. "Any advice on where to go first?"

"I'd recommend the group to your northwest," Wade said.

Josh appraised the group of red dots representing the people, looked at the blue dots representing large, angry animals, and worked out what he thought was the best route.

⁂

The first person Tara came across who had encountered one of the animals was Brick Flagg. Given that he seemed to be on the verge of a panic attack, she decided it was better not to have him be the one to describe the big scary animals to Wade. Also Brick wasn't the brightest ever.

The next was Junior who, in spite of his moments of insight, was generally not the best at picking up on things.

Then Penny, best known for her work for various charities. She was cradling her right arm, which was looking better, Tara thought, then when she'd joined the group.

When Penny's group had made contact, her arm was still bleeding, and wrapped in her shirt because they hadn't had anything better to bandage it with. Now it was in actual bandages and, while it might still be bleeding, definitely wasn't dripping anymore.

"Penny," Tara said to get her attention. When she had it, she asked, "Do you think you could describe the animal to someone who's helping us?"

Penny nodded, so Tara called Wade and said, "I've got someone who can describe one of the animals here. Before I give her the phone, I figured I'd give you an update.

"We're headed to a fallout shelter under the gym. It's very slow going because this many people can't exactly sneak passed anyone or anything so whenever something we don't want to meet gets in our way we have to change course. Hiding and unhiding is also a time consuming project.

"Some of the people here, including Penny -the girl who's going to describe the animal for you- need medical attention. Ron is semi-lucid. Pretty much what you'd expect.

"You get all that?"

"Yeah," Wade said.

"Ok," Tara said. She handed the phone to Penny and said, "His name is Wade, he's doing what he can to keep us safe."

Penny nodded and took the phone.

"Hi," she said, "what do you want to know?"

Tara wasn't sure if she should stay with her phone, or go back to the back of the group.

She'd left Ron and Bonnie in charge at the back. The look on Bonnie's face had been wonderful, but she'd actually had a good reason for the choice. Ron still wasn't recovered enough to take over the responsibility, while Bonnie had the presence, force, and attention to do it but lacked Ron's experience with bad situations.

Hopefully together they'd be up to the task, if they didn't kill each other.

Tara had made the argument that if Bonnie did this she'd be even with Ron for saving their lives at camp Wanaweep and saving Bonnie specifically when she'd been kidnapped by robots. It wasn't a particularly good argument, but it was one that would appeal to Bonnie. The only thing Bonnie could stand less than having to work with Kim or Ron was feeling like she owed one of them something.

In the end Tara decided to stay with the phone, and listened to Penny describe the animal.

"It was a dog," Penny said. "Yeah, well it was the biggest dog I've ever seen." Pause. "No. Bigger." Pause. "Not shaped like that though, more like a husky or something."

 _Great_ , Tara thought, _a dire wolf of doom_.

"Its fur was all black. That's how it snuck up on us. It was hard to make out in the darkness."

Long pause.

"Its claws are sharp. Really sharp. The wounds on my arm are more like incisions than lacerations." Pause. "I volunteer at the hospital every Saturday." Pause. "The impression that I've gotten from people who were bitten is that the teeth aren't that sharp." Pause. "Yeah, more ripping than cutting."

Long pause.

"I don't know . . . smaller than a bear." Pause. "It _was_ really cold . . . I didn't even think of it at the time, but shouldn't it have been hot?"

Long pause.

"I can't think of anything else; anything in particular you're interested in?" Pause. "Ok." Penny looked to Tara and said, "He wants to talk to you."

Tara took the phone and said, "Wade, go."

"I can guide you passed the dogs," Wade said, "but given the size of your group and how fast the dogs can move, I think we'd have to do it in stages."

Tara surveyed the group again then said, "It'd take a lot of stages."

"Is there anywhere people can wait until-"

"If there were a safe place we'd use that instead of the fallout shelter," Tara said.

"If they can keep turning you back just by walking around at random," Wade said, "Then you'll never make it to the fallout shelter."

"Then guide us around them a little at a time," Tara said. She started walking towards the front of the group. If there was going to be guiding that's where she'd need to be. "We'd be there by now if we could tell when the . . ." Tara still wasn't up for calling monsters that were hunting them "dogs", it seemed to understate the problem, she settled on, "things," and then finished with, "were following us and when they weren't."

⁂

Josh had about a dozen people, eleven to be exact, with him as he made his way toward the final group. Movement was done by sprinting to the next spot to hide when there were no blue dots around, catching their breath, waiting for a new opportunity with the blue dots not in the way, and sprinting again.

Even with the breath catching he was getting worn down, and he could see the others were too.

The Kimmunicator crackled to life.

"Well, I found out what the animals actually are," Wade said.

"What?" Josh asked.

"Dogs," Wade said.

"There's no such thing as a dog that big," Josh said.

"Obviously not normal dogs," Wade said. "You look like you're pretty close to getting everybody."

"Just have to cross the tennis courts," Josh said. The tennis courts behind Middleton High School were a large open area enclosed in chain link fence. The only idea that Josh could think of that was worse than going through them was going around them.

Thus the final sprint would be across a large open area in a chain-link cage, in the dark, where they might be mauled or eaten.

"I don't have any help I can give you out there," Wade said. "In fact, I was hoping you might have ideas."

"About what?" Josh asked.

"Tara's group is trying to get to a fallout shelter under the gym because it seems like it's the safest place," Wade said. "The problem is getting them there. There's safety in numbers, but it's also a lot harder to move a larger group.

"I can't figure out how to get the dogs away from them for long enough to let them get there," Wade said.

Josh could. Josh could think of a great way. It just wasn't one that he particularly liked.

"What are you thinking?" a member of his current group asked.

"We need bait," Josh said. "The phone idea was good, but if we really want to get them out of the way we need someone to catch their attention and then lead them somewhere else." His voice shook a bit as he said it. He remembered running for the cafeteria.

Running from one of them was a lot worse than running in hopes of avoiding them.

"I'm on the track team," another member of the group said.

"So am I," a third chimed in.

"Ok," Josh said, "But can you sprint a long distance run? Because that's what it would take.

"We could break it up," was the response. "Like a relay."

"That's a good idea," Wade said. "The Kimmunicator could always be with the runner, and once someone was done with their leg and the dogs were after the next person, they'd know the way back to the gym was clear.

"We could move all of Tara's group, and all but one of yours," Wade said.

"We still have to get all of my group," Josh said. "I'll call you back when I'm across the tennis courts."

"Got it," Wade said. The signal shut down.

Josh looked at the map. The red dots, the blue dots. Then he asked, "Everybody ready?"

He got nods of yes, but he knew the truth. None of them would ever be ready. Definitely not him. They just had to deal with going when they weren't ready.

So he said, "Run!"

⁂

"A distraction relay?" Tara asked. Then she had to tune out Barkin talking about military tactics. A sound tactician would be useful here, but Barkin just strung together words in a way that sounded vaguely meaningful while in fact being completely vacuous.

He'd been in the military, sure, but he'd never been one to make plans, only execute the orders that were passed down to him after the plans were made.

Tara had to think it over for a while. She believed that a larger group was in fact safer. No one had survived a one on one encounter with the animals. There were a couple of cases where someone just managed to outrun having such an encounter in the first place, but every single person amoung them who had actually faced off against one of the animals and lived had done so because other people in their group had been able to help them get away.

Still, what good was sticking together if they never got to a safe place? There had to be an endgame beyond surviving the moment if any of this were going to mean anything.

They rounded a corner and saw a severed hand, nothing else left of owner but blood.

"Alright," Tara said, "I'll start looking for volunteers.

⁂

"For the record," Josh said, "I think this is a stupid idea."

"Noted," Wade said. "You don't have to participate."

"No," Josh said, "I'll do my leg."

Then Josh handed the Kimmunicator to another student, and got ready to hide and wait.

⁂

"If we want to keep all of the dogs in the area occupied, we need to start with three runners," Wade said.

"We know that Wade," Tara told him.

Wade had lines open to two other people which, plus her, made the three runners.

"Ok, Tara, you're up first" Wade said. "Go . . . NOW!"

Tara sprinted away, loudly burst through a door she'd never understood the purpose of anyway because it just separated one hall from another section of largely identical hall, ran down the second hall-

"The first one heard you and is on your trail," Wade said over the phone. "Take a hard left at the next intersection." Tara did and, out of the corner of her eye, saw a large black form in one of the classrooms.

She didn't slow down.

"You've got two," Wade said. "When you reach the end of the hall go outside and turn right."

She bodily slammed into the door, using the impact to kill her forward momentum, and then sprinted to the right.

"Third one's coming," Wade said, "that's all of them in this direction. I'm calling the next leg."

In front of her a desk smashed through a window. She jumped in, someone else jumped out, and her leg of the journey was over.

She stayed out of sight, ignored the pain where the broken glass had cut into her, and tried to slow her breathing.

The three dogs passed the window and she was free to return.

She was walking slowly, still trying to catch her breath, when her phone rang.

"Tara," Wade said, "I need you to get back to the others."

"What's going on?" she asked, even though her exhaustion made her want to say, "No."

"I don't know," Wade said. "I'm getting strange temperature readings. Not like the dogs, but I think there's something headed for the group."

"On it," Tara said and started running back to where she'd left the others.

⁂

Josh was waiting to be the last leg of the relay, in theory the group should be mostly safe by now, all he had to do was to keep the dogs occupied for the runners to make it back.

Someone ducked into the classroom he was waiting in, he snatched the offered Kimmunicator on his way out of the room and then ran. Before long he could hear the dogs behind him. Was it six or seven? He didn't quite remember.

"Josh, I've updated the map to show something elses," Wade said. "Or somethings else. We don't know what they are yet so your best bet is to stay clear."

"Josh glanced down and saw that the red and blue dots had been joined by areas colored in a lighter blue than the dots marking the dogs.

That seemed wonderful. Entire areas of question mark, rather than just points of dog, that he'd have to avoid.

⁂

As Tara approached the gym she saw that most of the group was already inside, so that, at least, was good news. She also saw dark shapes -though "shapes" might be giving the things too much credit- which she thought were approaching the people.

She couldn't seem to focus on them. Her eyes seemed to want to go right through them. Definitely not dogs.

The dark things reached the group a moment before she did and . . . they seemed like darkness. But how could there be darker dark than dark? How could shadows move?

They also seemed to be bad for the people. Whenever someone touched one they flinched away, but soon everyone was surrounded, soon after engulfed, and whatever was happening, it was slowing them down.

If they were somehow creatures of darkness, then Tara though maybe light could keep them back. It was a major leap, but she didn't have a lot of options.

She ran into the group, thus into the darker dark, and was immediately chilled to to the bone. She made for the center of the dark and shouted, "Rufus, Diablo Sauce!"

The rodent threw her a packet and, with fingers shaking from the cold, she replicated a stunt from Ron's overly long talent show performance: Fire breathing.

The darker shadows scattered, leaving them outside in the not-as-dark dark of a cloudy night, and the cold dissipated with their departure.

Tara herself, however, had been reduced to a shivering mass.

"Great trick T," Bonnie said, as she helped Tara to her feet.

"She got it from my act," Ron said as he too helped Tara.

Tara just shouted, "Everyone get inside!"

Ron and Bonnie helped Tara follow her own command.

⁂

 **2004 – The After**

Kim didn't know all that many dead people. Most people she knew were in her age group or professionals near the prime of their careers. Not too many older people. Still, Kim had faith that dead people could not be wholly bad.

The mention of "Life lovers" had given her a new goal and, in theory, a new direction. She was going to find the good dead people and get advice from them on how to get back to the world of the living, and how to save the world of the living once she got there.

She wasn't trying to get up, she wasn't trying to get out, so she'd have a different approach, ideally she'd go in an outward spiral to search for these other dead people's territory, in practice she'd probably go on a pseudo-random walk in which she tried to angle to the left more often than the right, but not so much more often as to go in a circle.

She was without _Team Possible_ , but she was still _a_ Possible and that meant she could do anything, even deal with this ferociously weird sitch.

She just had to be more careful. When she was solo she tended to underestimate the amount she usually relied on backup. It was how she ended up secured to a wall inside of the world's largest cheese wheel. It was how she'd been captured by Drakken this time.

She couldn't afford to make the same mistake again. Not here.

Just because anything was possible didn't mean that a given thing would come easy, just because she could do anything didn't mean that she _would_ be able to do a specific thing if she let herself get sloppy. She didn't have Wade, she didn't have Ron, she didn't have Rufus. And she didn't have much in the way of resources.

⁂

Even in the afterlife, it seemed, there were things that could make you giggle.

She'd found that the deeper she went, the more signs of "life" there were, so now her attempted expanding spiral also had a downward trajectory. There were settlements she'd skirted the edges of, mockeries of those in the living world, and here, it seemed, a sign that indicated "No Ammit Allowed" assuming she was interpreting it correctly.

After someone empowered by Anubis had tried to take out his grudge against pro-wrestlers, Kim had decided that Ancient Egyptian Religion might be worth her attention. As such, she could easily recognize a picture of the eater of hearts.

Given that Ammit was a god known for sending dead people to a second, more devastating, death, Kim could see why dead people might not want her around.

Other than the sign, this settlement didn't have much of interest to Kim, there was no indication that she might have crossed into a different territory, and thus no reason to risk the attention of the ones dwelling in it.

⁂

"Everything dies," Kim softly said to herself. If she was right she was looking at a river god. Dead river, dead god. It was like half remembered echoes of water, afterimages and impressions, a sense of water without actually getting wet. It was like a happy memory that had turned sad because of the knowledge that one could never relive it again.

It made Kim want to cry.

It wasn't, however, what she was looking for.

It had attendants, and Kim had no way of knowing if they were good, bad, or neutral dead people. She gave them a wide berth and continued on.

⁂

Time was difficult to gauge. There was no sun, there were no stars. Kim didn't wear a watch. She was without her usual gadgets.

How long had it been since the river god? How long since the last bad-dead-people settlement?

She was now in a place that had to be filed under "Ferociously Weird".

It looked like a carnival -an American-style traveling circus- that seemed remarkably pristine, given the decayed state of everything else she'd encountered, but was also entirely empty.

Just a large place with rides, games, bright lights, attractions of all sorts, and a total lack of anyone in it. No one, living or dead.

Not creepy at all, that.

There was a strange mist in the air, strange because none of the other caverns had had any, that spread the glow from the lights well beyond their sources. As Kim surveyed the area she decided that her best way forward was to go through the carnival. The only passages out were on the other end of the cavern and if she doubled back she'd have to go a long way.

If she went around she'd be out in the open for a long time, where if she were in the carnival itself she'd have lots of potential cover to hide in if anyone did show up.

As she approached, Kim had an increasing feeling that the entire area had a dreamlike quality to it, though she couldn't really say why, and she had the impression that she was getting further from the reality she knew.

"Further"? Or was it "farther"?

Once she arrived she kept low and made sure there were always things obstructing line of sight in as many directions as possible. She felt like she was floating as she made her way through the place, and size and mass didn't seem to have as much meaning.

She passed empty concession stands, booths with games and prizes but no vendors, no operators. She was hungry and thirsty, but didn't trust the unguarded concessions.

A hurricane ride came to life as she passed it, for a moment she thought she'd been spotted but no one came, just a large mechanical ride operating on its own with no one in it. The mist and the spinning warped and twisted the light, which seemed to leak out of the lights themselves more than it seemed to shine.

The effect was almost hypnotic.

Definitely "further". Not amount of distance could explain this, it was entirely about degree.

If she made it out alive -if the world didn't end- she was totally going to do a great job on the "problem words" quiz in English class next Friday.

She made it the rest of the way without incident, and was glad to put that particular cavern behind her.

⁂

Kim expected ghosts to look like they had in life, but the ones she was seeing now were, at best, caricatures of humanity. Traits exaggerated almost beyond recognition.

The worst were the gluttons at the banquet table. They were like something from the fever dreams of fat shaming fitness peddlers. Watching them made Kim feel sick, and she averted her gaze, but in the crowd here they were almost unremarkable. They were the worst, yes, but hardly by much.

Mixed among the twisted people were some who didn't even appear to be human, and maybe they weren't, but if so Kim had no idea what they were.

 _Twice is a coincidence_ , Kim told herself. This was three times. The River god, the deserted carnival, and now this. She wasn't in the same place she started. She'd obviously successfully passed into some different territory, but she didn't feel she was in the land of the life lovers now. She didn't know where she was.

Next time she had a chance she'd take a hard left. Best to skirt the territory of the bad ones to make sure she didn't miss the ones she was looking for by making too wide of a spiral.

⁂

After traveling through largely unremarkable less surreal surroundings and uninhabited caves, Kim heard a sound that was like an injection of joy straight into her heart. Or … maybe the pleasure center of her brain. Whatever.

It was a slow, steady, almost annoying dripping of water.

At least she assumed it was water.

With energy she thought she'd long since lost she ran to chase the source of the sound, hit several dead ends -echoes could throw one off so easily- and finally located the source of the dripping sound.

Cautious at first she touched it, smelled it, looked at it as closely as she could, and finally concluded to the best of her ability that it was indeed water.

She was so thirsty that she wasn't willing to wait for the water to drip, she licked it off of the wet rocks, then, when she reached the point where she thought she might lose more than she gained by doing that, positioned herself so that when it dripped the drop would fall into her mouth.

Drip. Wetness. Drip. The nectar of the gods. Drip. Hydration. Drip. The stuff of life. Drip. Wondrous, wondrous water.

⁂

Kim cautiously approached what looked like a standard American cookie cutter home in suburbia, right down to the white picket fence. Of course it was showing signs of wear. Paint on the fence peeled, the wooden siding was warped and, in some places, missing. Instead of a grass lawn was what Kim might euphamistically describe as compost, or, if she wanted to be more honest with herself, as a giant festering pile of sick and wrong _ick_.

If things were going _as planned_ then this was not a friendly place. After wandering so far afield, the _revised_ revised plan called for skirting around the hostile territory so that she didn't risk missing her target by going too far from the center on her first pass. Then she'd go further out if she'd done a full circuit without seeing any indication of where the "life lovers" were.

The only way to make sure that she did that was to first get back to the hostile territory, and then back off a bit. Thus, even if everything was going exactly according to plan, this was not a place she'd be safe.

She quietly hopped the fence and tried very hard not to think of what she was standing in. It didn't work. Trying not to think of something never worked.

At least she was wearing her mission clothes: no bare skin below the waist.

With the digusting lawn behind her she just had to go up the... Kim felt wood start to buckle beneath her and heard the beginning of a structure breaking crack. How did the dead people use these stairs? How much lighter could a corpse really be?

Before the step could give way she backed, then she crawled up the porch steps. With her weight distributed over a larger area, the stairs held.

She crept to a window and looked in on a scene that was, in it's own way, more mind bending than the empty floaty misty dreamlike carnival had been.

If they weren't dead, if their walls and bodies weren't rotting and moldering, if agents of decay weren't feasting on their flesh in a way that made Kim want to vomit, if all of these things weren't true, they'd look a 1950s TV family straight from central casting.

They were watching an ancient television that must have been operating on some kind of magic because Kim was pretty sure that she could see rust lined voids where some vital components were supposed to be.

"While the gateway is nowhere near stable enough for any of our forces to pass through at this stage, rest assured that the lesser beings are gaining a foothold in the living world," a voice from the TV said. "We recommend that you channel all of your anticipation into preparation. Various military and militia organizations are accepting and training new recruits in record volumes. Stay tuned for your local broadcasters to tell you about the options to enroll near you."

Having confirmed that she'd passed back into enemy territory, Kim made her way off of the porch, across the compost, over the fence, and back the way she came. She'd try to stay just outside of their territory now. Occasionally heading back in to make sure that she hadn't gotten too far away.

⁂

By now Kim was pretty much ready to encounter anything. At least she felt that way. Hulking nine headed vaguely person shaped thing? Seen it. It didn't seem malevolent, but Kim decided not to bother it, and stay well out of sight, just to be on the safe side. A talking squirrel mumbling to itself about how "the corpse chewing serpent"'s insults weren't what they used to be? Been there but stayed out of it's way as it seemed to be in a hurry. Girl who could turn into sand? Avoided her. She did seem malevolent.

Even so, the trips she took back into the hostile territory were always unpleasant. That she was in a place with rotting corpses that could still walk around, talk, and do things didn't faze her anymore. The concept wasn't a problem. They were putrid and noxious, though. They were surrounded by all possible markers of death and decay.

Their buildings, like their bodies, had been turned into mockeries of the ones used by the living. Kim doubted it was through any sort of intent, they just suffered under the weight of entropy, and were slowly devoured by decay.

That could still get to Kim. Her mind was prepared to deal with this sitch; her stomach was not.

Also, their conversations were entirely unhelpful. Scorning the living seemed to be a required part of any conversation, so at least she knew that she wasn't hiding from the "life lovers" by accident, but whenever they said anything of substance they always seemed to take for granted things that Kim didn't know. The very information that Kim wanted to learn was what went without saying for them. At least that was how it seemed.

⁂

"Look, I'm not one of _them_ -I don't think those in first-life are somehow more worthy than us- I just don't see why we'd even want to return to that wretched world."

There was "them" again, but no indication where "they" might be found. "They" were always "them" never, "those guys up north" or "the people across the river" or anything at all that indicated who or where "they" were. It's not as if Kim could use the information, she didn't have a compass or a map, but it was still frustrating that the only marker of "Them" beyond occasional mention of "life loving", was the fact that it was always said with the utmost disdain. It wasn't helpful.

Couldn't someone just say, "Of course you know Bob..." and deliver all the information Kim needed?

Kim shook her head turned to sneak away. Then she slipped. It wouldn't have been a problem but she instinctively reached out and grabbed for something to steady herself on. Her left hand caught a windowsill. Rather than support her weight the board split.

There were shouts inside the building, but Kim was more concerned with getting on her feet and running than trying to listen.

A door burst open as she reached the edge of this property. The voices became easier to make out, "It's probably just-"

"No! We can't take any chances with a gateway open!"

In any world a shotgun pointed in her direction was more than enough impetus for Kim to make a tactical retreat. That it was fired was almost more a formality than anything. So long as the shot missed her, and it did, a loaded gun being pointed at her was no less of a reason to run than a loaded gun being pointed at her after it had fired a shot. Even if she hadn't already been leaving, it was definitely time to retreat now.

In this particular case she had no one to regroup with and no reason to try to get around the person with the gun. She just had to get away. She kept running.

x  
x x  
x x x  
x x  
x

Names, in case you don't rememember the characters mentioned.  
-Brick is the Quarterback  
-Junior is one of the dention regulars that Kim had to spend her incarceration with in _Tick Tick Tick_  
-Penny is a girl that Ron was able to impress when he was hit by the truth-ray in _The Truth Hurts_ but then totally failed to make conversation with when it wore off.

Jacob, no last name, is an original character of mine who debuted in original, not fan, fiction but this will be his longest appearance to date.

This is a revision because the original was an increasingly desperate and frantic exercise in speed writing. I tried to keep the original versions of the 3+ chapters that had been written as a sort of appendix at the end, but the way fanfiction dot net works just makes it massively impracticable. If you want the original pre-revision version, then put "Stealing Commas" "Life After" into google and the first result should be an index of current installments, pre-revision posts, meta posts, and even a preview or two.


	3. I-3: If we can make it through the night

[Shin Possible is the creation of Blackbird, used with permission]

 **Part I  
** **Chapter 3: If we can make it through the night**

 **O**  
 **O X**  
 **⁂** \+ **⁂**  
 **⁂** **⁂** **⁂** **⁂**  
 **⁂** \+ + + **⁂  
** **⁂** **⁂** \+ + **⁂ ⁂  
** **⁂** \+ **⁂** \+ **⁂** \+ **⁂  
** **⁂ ⁂** **⁂** **⁂** **⁂ ⁂ ⁂** **⁂**

 **2029 – Earth**

The two had long since stopped running and were now walking down their chosen road, the remains of an interstate highway.

They were three moving beacons, the twin green lights of Shin's hands, the blue beam of Jacob's palm-light. Anything with functional eyes -photo-receptive cells of any kind really- would spot them, but at the moment they were more concerned with something that had no body parts at all.

With dusk passed, darkness ruled. Shapes seemed to flit in and out of existence, and the shadows moved in ways that didn't quite match the lights that ought to be casting them.

Shadows weren't erased by the three lights, they were frightened off by them.

⁂

"It's got to be an hour and a half since we stopped running and started walking," Jacob said. "That's a lot of time to think; got any idea what they are?"

"Yeah," Shin said, "I know what they are."

 _Then why the Hell didn't you tell me?_ Jacob thought but didn't say.

"I can't figure out how there could be so many, or why they're here though," Shin said.

"Well that's the same as everything else," Jacob said. "What are they?"

"They're nothings," Shin said.

Jacob sighed. "For people who don't know . . ." he couldn't think of the word, or words, for what he wanted to convey, "whatever the hell the term is."

"No idea what you're talking about." Shin said as Jacob tried to chase through his memory to find the words.

"Inside baseball!" Jacob said triumphantly. "For people who don't speak inside baseball could y-"

"What difference does it make whether the baseball is inside or outside?" Shin asked.

"I didn't make the language, I just speak it," Jacob said.

"Well what does it mean?" Shin asked.

"I don't speak spook -unless by 'spook' you mean 'spy' because I totally speak spy, not well mind you, but I speak it enough to have some understanding of what CIA types are saying," Jacob said. "But this magic crap is something I don't know the terminology for, so for the benefit of the lay person over here, walking next to you, surrounded by things that appear to be living shadows, what do you mean when you say that they're 'nothings'? Because I've got a feeling that they're not sweet things you whisper in your girlfriend's ear."

"See, that made sense," Shin said. "Is it so hard to say things that make sense?"

"What are they?" Jacob said in a near growl. He didn't like being kept in the dark. He didn't like it literally, and he really didn't like it figuratively.

"They're absences, lacks." Shin said. "They're the lack of light, the lack of heat, the lack of life."

"That's very enlightening," Jacob said, and it was only half sarcastic.

"Most of them are barely sentient, they can be kept at bay by heat, light, and life in large enough amounts."

"Like sunshine?" Jacob asked.

"Yeah, like sunshine," Shin said.

It explained why they only came out when the sun was setting.

"What do they want?" Jacob asked.

"What anything wants," Shin said, "to thrive. They don't really think, they don't have a concept of good or evil, they just want to expand, to spread, to fill up any available space with themselves."

"Like human beings," Jacob said. "What happens if they fill our space with themselves?"

"No heat, no light, no life," Shin said. "Do the math."

"It's a race to see whether they snuff out our life force directly or kill us with hypothermia?" Jacob asked.

"The hypothermia is more likely," Shin said. "A lot more likely. They really are just . . . nothing."

"Anyone who's ever built a laser cannon on a space station knows that nothing can be really hard on a person."

"Well, the good news is they aren't an absence of air," Shin said.

"Mixed blessing at best," was Jacob's response. "Vacuum might be cold, but because there's nothing there it takes a long damn time to freeze anything. With a full air supply we'll freeze a lot faster."

"You're always a ray of sunshine," Shin said.

"I try to be," Jacob said. There was no need for a sarcastic tone, some things had it built right into the words and the context. "So we can't up our life, but we can totally increase light and heat by making a fire."

"Yeah," Shin said, "but most mushrooms have too much water in them to make good bonfire fodder."

"I'll keep an eye out for anything different," Jacob said.

"Good," Shin said.

"I could have been doing it already if you'd told me what we were up against when you figured out yourself."

"Whatever."

And with that they lapsed into silence.

⁂

The surface of the highway was cracked, warped, eroded, missing in places, and so forth, but there was still enough of it to make it easy for Jacob to pick up on the sound of footsteps.

Footsteps behind them that seemed to be following them.

It took Jacob a few moments to be sure he wasn't hearing some kind of echo, then he said, "Someone's following us." A moment later he added, "Or, you know, something."

"I hear it too," Shin said. "Don't look back."

That didn't seem to make any sense, but this was a day for not making sense, so Jacob just asked, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Shin said.

⁂

"So," Jacob said, "About the not looking back thing-"

"Don't look back," Shin repeated.

"Whoever or whatever it is has almost caught up to us," Jacob said.

"You're talking to a witch's girlfriend on Halloween night after being attacked by an army of dead people-"

"And animals," Jacob said. "Don't forget the bear."

Shin shivered. "I can't forget the bear. I want to, but I can't. The point is, don't look back."

"Ok, Orpheus, I won't look back," Jacob said.

"Did you have to use that reference?"

"Could be worse," Jacob said; "I could have called you Eurydice."

⁂

Shin was sure something was different.

They'd been through groves in the darkness before, but this one was different. She tried to look more closely at her surroundings to figure out what was different. The dark pillars around them this time were definitely the source of her sense something about this grove was unlike the others. Not like stalks of mushrooms but . . .

"This was a birch grove once," Shin said.

"Thank you pixie scout," Jacob said. "Will it burn?"

Shin took a closer look at the husks of trees around them. "Dry rot," she concluded. "It'll burn."

"Bonfire?" Jacob asked her.

Shin nodded, not even sure if he was looking in her direction and said, "Bonfire."

⁂

"Well, light it already," Jacob said. Shin hesitated.

"What?" Jacob asked.

"There's a thing about fires today. . ."

"More Halloween stuff?" Jacob said not bothering to hide the fact that his annoyance bordered on anger. "Like me not being allowed to eat my damned apple?"

"I haven't eaten since lunch either," Shin snapped back at him. "It's just that if we start this fire we need to keep it alive."

"That's the _plan_ ," Jacob said impatiently.

"Bad things could happen if we let the fire die," Shin warned.

"Bad things like being pursued by living darkness?" Jacob said. "Or maybe living corpses? Or maybe-" _having our entire world erased by changes to the timeline_ , he'd been going to say. Shin interrupted him.

"Bad things like it's possible our lives will be linked directly to the fate of the fire and the flames dying will mean death for us too," Shin said.

Ok, maybe that was worth worrying about, but, "We agreed that the keeping the darkness back was worth the risk before we even left the city," Jacob said.

"Yeah," Shin said.

"Before you came to your disturbing death-by-hypothermia related conclusion as to what the darkness was," Jacob added.

"Yeah," Shin said. She lit the bonfire they'd set up with a burst of plasma. "I just don't like the idea that my life might be tied to something as ephemeral as fire."

"My nemesis isn't the type to die just because a flame went out," Jacob said.

⁂

Watching the fire made Jacob philosophical. Not that it took too much to do that.

Still, the fire. It destroyed, but in the process it created a brilliant work of shifting art that was one of a kind. The flames consumed, but they caressed rather than devoured.

Air, spark, and wood all came together to create light, heat, and ash. It was the changing of forms.

He turned his attention to Shin. She was sleeping while he took this watch. They'd flipped, he'd lost.

Sleep could make anyone seem likable. Without the power of speech or posture, one would never know that she was an irritating moralizing hero who had been constantly ruining his working days since they first met.

She seemed almost . . . innocent. Like she might have been one to run with his friends when they were kids. Looting dumpsters for food, pulling up grates on the road in search of warm places to sleep, maybe picking the occasional pocket.

While she slept it was easy to look at her and pretend she was a decent human being not the self-righteous child of the world's greatest moralizer and the biggest defector in the history of those who worked outside the established lines of the system.

Not that Jacob blamed Shego. He certainly had little respect for what she'd become, but receiving a full pardon in the wake of an alien invasion and having her cherished princess within reach obviously put more pressure to change on her than anyone could be expected to resist. So she'd been swayed.

He didn't blame her for that.

But, still, here was her spawn. One part Shego, the poster child for reform, one part Kim Possible, poster child for never wavering hero. And yet she looked almost . . . normal maybe?

Redeemable? Like someone who had potential?

Jacob threw some more dead wood on the fire and stoked the forming embers. When you just looked at the flame, but knew nothing of the purpose, good and evil disappeared and you just saw the thing, you saw all of the potential but none of the hang-ups.

In her sleep Shin looked like a potential friend.

When he was younger there had been times when a group was in a place where Shin would say they didn't belong just because it was all illegal or some such, and he'd had his turn at watch. He'd seen sleeping friends then.

When he couldn't sleep, but he pretended to so his sister wouldn't stay up to worry, he'd seen sis sleep.

Those were the only people he'd ever seen sleep before. The other kids he'd run with once; his sister.

Allies. Family.

Shin slept like them.

No way to tell that she was the fire that burned down your home, rather than the fire that kept you warm. Not when she was asleep.

⁂

A voice seemed to come from a great distance, "Get up!"

"Five more minutes," Shin said. She didn't even need to give thought to it. It was her standard response.

"Now!" the voice said, closer now. "I need your random- to Hell with it." The voice was very close now. "They're getting away with the pan-dimensional vortex inducer!"

Shin was on her feet in a moment, shaking the sleep from her eyes and ready to fight or chase. Then she remembered what was going on and was trying to think of something truly nasty to say to Jacob when she noticed that he was bathed in _blue_ light.

"Any of your random lore talk about that," Jacob asked, pointing at the bonfire burning in shades from cerulean to cyan with perhaps just a hint of teal sprinkled in.

Yes, yes it did. "Run," she said.

"What about keeping the fire-" Jacob tried to ask.

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him, "Forget it; just run!"

She lit the hand that wasn't holding his and, as soon as she was sure that he was running with her, let go of him and lit the other. Soon after he had his palm-light on again. A moment later there was a a sound like very, very close thunder and air rushed back toward the birch grove threatening to knock them over.

"What the Hell?" Shin asked as she and Jacob helped each other up.

They were barely running again when the same thing happened back and to their right, then their left.

She didn't even understand the damage, and didn't try to look at it. She didn't dare slow herself by looking anywhere but forward.

If she looked she'd turn, if she turned she'd slow down, if she slowed down...

She forced herself not to think about that and just _ran_.

Blue flame on any other night meant little to nothing. Flame color depended on temperature, what was being burned, trace elements, and various other things. But tonight blue flame meant a supernatural entity had entered the room.

The outdoors was a big room, and Shin doubted that even Logi himself could turn a the flames _that_ blue by mere presence.

Something had come, something powerful, and whatever it was was so interested in them as to knock the fire test off the scale.

Based on what little they'd seen of this changed world, she'd known it probably wasn't friendly before things went boom.

By her own light she saw an obstruction ahead. "Left!" she called out and received a helpful shove from Jacob. At any other time, in any other circumstance, a shove wouldn't be a helpful thing, but at the moment she appreciated the ability to make a tighter turn and showed that appreciation by shaking the plasma from her right hand and giving Jacob a yank to allow him to do the same.

⁂

It felt like fleeing a tornado they couldn't see, not that Jacob had a lot of experience with tornadoes.

Sounds of destruction behind them, beside them, around them. They were being targeted, with the only plus side being that whatever was doing it didn't seem to have very precise aim. Not terribly accurate either.

But what the hell was going on? If things were exploding then the shock should-

Jacob shouted over the destruction, "It's super cooling -colloquial not technical sense-"

"Don't talk," Shin shouted back, "run!"

"-the air," Jacob said. "Air shrinks to zero point one five percent of its normal size when liquefied."

Jacob stumbled and Shin helped to steady him.

"Shut up and run!" she shouted at him.

"That's a lot of space to fill," Jacob said, "so near vacuum equals implosion and that's what's going on."

"No talkie," Shin shouted, definitely angry now. "Run!"

"Of course to do that," this time Shin stumbled over something, gods only knew where they were or what they were getting tripped up by, regardless Jacob helped her up while running, then said, "It has to drop the temperature to below negative 320 degrees."

"Fascinating I'm sure," Shin snapped. "Shut up and run."

"And it's doing it with obvious intention and targeting," Jacob said.

"Would you just-" Shin shouted.

Jacob finally made it to his point, "I thought you said they were barely sentient."

"I said _most_ were," was Shin's reply. "Will you shut up now?"

"Yes," Jacob said. "Up shutting."

And he did.

⁂

They'd both fallen so many times, they were doubtless scraped and bruised all over, each had helped the other too many times to keep track of, but it wasn't doing them any good.

They were running out of energy, and it was gaining on them. The air was colder than it had any right to be, and soon it wouldn't be throwing poorly aimed attacks at them to kill them, it would just engulf them and they'd become what it was: nothing.

Shin had never heard of a nothing this powerful before, nor one this smart. Certainly not one this large.

Hunting was entirely out of the question. Nothings tried to grow, spread, and even reproduce, and that meant pushing beyond the bounds of afforded them by the heat, light, and life, but to hunt living things? It was unheard of.

They were forces of nature: no more malevolent than nighttime, and as impersonal as a sunburn.

So why was this happening?

Was this one territorial? The life nothings were most hostile to, by nature not intent, was animal life. The life that threatened them most was warm blooded life and bioluminescent life. The draugar did not offer warmth, life, or even light.

That last was maybe-

The ground came up and hit Shin in the face. Jacob yanked her to her feet and she could feel the weakness in his arms. His legs must be doing just as badly. Just like her own.

"Keep up, Possible," he said, but there was no fire in it.

He obviously knew what she knew: it was just a matter of time.

Jacob had gotten to figure out how the implosions worked, Shin was going to figure this out. Even if it was, very literally, the last thing she did. She would figure this out.

Like she told Jacob, draugar weren't zombies. They might not be people -or animals- anymore, but they weren't stupid. They could have had the ruined city lit up just as easily as a human population. They didn't. Maybe they were afraid of what was chasing Shin and Jacob now.

Maybe by being the only living animals, and having a fire, a source of light and heat, an anathema to nothings, they'd marked themselves as enemies. But that only made sense if it had a reason to oppose those things rather than flee them.

Could this one be territorial?

She'd never heard of such a thing, but she'd never heard of _this_.

Could be that being out in the open with a bonfire was all it took to make this one come after them. Could be that that was equivalent of charging someone weapons out. Could be-

Both of them stumbled as the terrain changed drastically. It was a steep slope. It might have been an embankment, it might have been a natural feature, but whatever it was, they couldn't let it slow them down much. Shim scrambled up it, and then heard Jacob fall and slide down.

She went back for him, pulled him up, and then had her plan of berating him die when she realized how much he was shivering.

"We're not going to make it, are we?" she said, right arm around him, left hand burning as bright and hot as she could manage.

"Stupid hero can't do math," Jacob said through chattering teeth. Of course he'd go out with insults. It was, after all, their relationship.

She didn't say anything. The world had gone quiet. There were no more implosions. The nothing knew that it had won and was simply going to engulf them, the air grew colder.

"Jacob and Shin, subtract a Jacob, what's left?" Jacob said.

"I'm not leaving you," Shin said.

"Stupid hero bullshit," Jacob said.

She let go of Jacob, stood up straight, turned back the way they'd come, lit both her hands, and took a few steps toward what she assumed was the general direction of the center of the nothing, and tried to pick her last words.

Jacob's palm-light flickered and died.

She considered stealing from one of her mothers: _I'm not going to let you kill Jacob; that's my job._ Didn't fit. For one thing it wasn't her job to kill Jacob. For another it could send the wrong message since one mother had said that _about her other mother_.

She could feel her plasma cooling and see it dim.

She considered some sort of over the top thing about how she was the light holding back the darkness, or saying that she'd claimed this ground and the nothing shall not pass.

The darkness was becoming so great it was hard to see anything, even her own hands.

Her consideration was broken when Jacob asked, "So, we're definitely going to die, right?"

That simplified things. She certainly considered telling him a comforting lie, but she wasn't going to have her last words be lies. So she just said, "Looks that way."

There was a sound that, though familiar, Shin couldn't quite place, and then a sudden flurry of light.

Small lights with no apparent source danced around her

"Fireflies?" Jacob asked.

Shin turned to Jacob and got a better view of the situation. While the lights were flying in both directions and didn't seem to have any fixed course, they were all vaguely tracing the same shape: a large circle around herself and Jacob both.

"Will-o'-wisps," Shin said, "Don't follow them."

"Not Jack's lanterns?" Jacob asked in an amused tone.

"It's not funny," Shin snapped, "they lead people to their deaths for fun."

"I'm not actually laughing," Jacob said. True, but he wasn't taking the situation nearly seriously enough. "And I'm not going anywhere." That was a more pertinent point. He was still shivering. Still chattering teeth. "Aren't they supposed to be off in the distance?" he asked.

"They usually are," Shin said, "I've never seen them this close and I don't-" Shin remembered the sound that she didn't recognize but knew was familiar. She took a closer look at Jacob, specifically his hands. There it was. "You bit the apple."

He shrugged, "I'm not dying on an empty stomach."

"I told you not to," Shin said.

"Hey," Jacob said, "notice how we're not facing immediate death from encroaching darkness anymore?"

He was right, and that was why she wasn't exactly complaining. They hadn't just pushed it back with their initial appearance, the wisps did seem to be keeping the darkness at bay still. They didn't seem to be losing any ground to it at all.

The most powerful nothing in history, and it was being held in check by a few dancing lights.

She thought about the situation for a bit, considering various possibilities.

"If we sleep the wisps will take the apple, then they'll leave, and we'll die," she finally said. "We'll have to sleep in shifts. Again"

Jacob nodded, "The one who's awake guards the apple but also feeds out just enough to keep them interested."

Finally he was taking the situation seriously.

⁂

Jacob accepted Shin's help as they walked, surrounded by the living lights, looking for a good place. He was simply too tired and far too cold to maintain professional animosity. Beyond the fact that his aching legs could use all the help they could get, the hands Shin held him with stayed lit at a low level, providing much needed warmth that circulated through the rest of his body.

Eventually they found a place that Shin pronounced, "Good enough," and, with her help, Jacob lay down on the ground.

⁂

Shin got first watch, she'd said that it was because she'd slept most recently, but the truth was that she was worried that Jacob was nearly dead.

Her plasma was both more and less versatile than most people imagined, but one thing the wild mass guessing public did get right was that she didn't have to worry about hypothermia under most conditions found on earth. She had internal heating the likes of which no earth creature -save those in her immediate family- could compare to, much less match.

Jacob, on the other hand, was an ordinary human being who was simply at the high end of the scales when it came to athleticism and invention.

It was a decent camp, there wasn't wood, but there were enough dry-ish growths that she got a small fire going. Of course, they'd come this way with not much light besides that which the wisps had provided them. That was disturbing. She told herself that they hadn't followed the wisps, strictly speaking, they were just utilizing the wisps' light while the wisps followed _them_. She was able to accept that rationalization, even if she wasn't sure she believed it.

She made sure to throw out tiny bits of apple on occasion, she didn't want the wisps to lose interest. They circled at a steady distance, and right outside of that dark on dark danced in a malevolent fashion. The nothing that had chased them seemed to have attracted other nothings.

They wouldn't have the same power, intelligence, or malicious drive, but they were still dangerous.

She turned her attention to Jacob. Shin could tell by his breathing he was nearly asleep.

"Finally," Jacob said, his voice so groggy Shin thought he might be talking in his sleep, "something else in the animal kingdom that's not dead."

Shin didn't pay attention until Jacob said, "See?" and held up his hand. There was a large wolf spider on it.

Shin smiled.

"Normally a spider is just a spider," she said, "but tonight that means that you've got the spirit of a loved one watching over you."

Jacob sighed as he put his hand back down and let the spider crawl away, "Must be for you then. Sis is like us," he closed his eyes and was almost asleep, but after a long moment he said, "too young to have been born here," and then he was really gone.

While Jacob slept, Shin thought about that. It wasn't just Jacob's family. Her older sisters, her friends, her rivals, Kieran . . . if Jacob was right about the effect of changing the timeline, and it made sense that he was, none of them would exist.

She and Jacob didn't belong in this world, and so many of the people she cared about had been erased from existence entirely.

On the up side, Jacob didn't snore. On the down side, Shin had never felt more alone.

⁂ **  
**

 **2004 - Earth**

Tara was too cold to use her cellphone properly. Her fingers didn't do precisely what she told them to do, she was shivering so much she was at risk of hitting the wrong buttons, so forth. Bonnie dialed Wade. Tara had asked Ron to, but Bonnie had insisted.

Holding the phone was an easier thing that didn't require fine motor skills, so she was able to talk to Wade on her own.

"Wade?" she asked when the ringing stopped.

"I'm here," Wade said.

"The other things," Tara said, "the ones that aren't the dogs, they're dark and cold."

"Can you be more specific?" Wade asked.

"No, you don't understand," Tara said. "That's all they are."

"Dark and cold?" Wade asked. A charitable conclusion was that he was perplexed. Less charitable conclusions would be that he incredulous or possibly even trying to humor her the way one might humor a small child in the middle of a schizoid break.

"They don't have any solid parts," Tara said, making an effort not to get angry at Wade for failing to understand the concept. "They're just empty air where the inside is darker and colder than the surrounding area."

"Ok," Wade said, his tone now a neutral acceptance.

"And if the amount I'm shivering right now is any indication," Tara said, "They can be really cold when they're in a swarm."

"There was a heat spike and then they seemed to scatter," Wade said.

"Fire breathing," Tara said. "I figured dark and cold wouldn't like fire."

"Since it's light and hot?" Wade said.

"Pretty much," Tara said. Then she paid some attention to her surroundings again. They were in the fallout shelter, which was quite spacious. It had obviously been designed to hold everyone who would normally be at the school -a thousand students with associated faculty and staff- plus area people who didn't have a closer shelter.

It more than fit their needs. People were having wounds treated, other than that nothing much was being done by anyone. Most people seemed stunned or afraid; everyone seemed run down.

⁂

Josh hoped everyone else was having a better time getting clear than he was, which had been the plan. The relay had to end somewhere, and the last person wouldn't have anyone distracting the dogs. He'd chosen to be the last person because he happened to be in charge of his group, and he didn't want to order anyone else to do the most risky part. If he'd known how hard it would be, maybe he'd have done something intelligent like let one of the track stars, who had volunteered and probably would have been more likely to survive, take the job.

As it was he was staying alive mostly by means of having arms. The dogs were big, the dogs were scary, the dogs were fast, but they were incapable of changing direction as quickly as a human being who could reach out, grab onto something, and pivot around it as if they hated their shoulder with a fiery passion and were just begging it to become dislocated.

He'd tried doubling back to the auditorium because the stage rigging there was the only place in the school accessible solely by ladder, but so far it was all he could do to keep one step, sometimes less, ahead of the dogs. Actually making directed progress proved entirely impossible.

Josh pulled another tight corner and, as his shoulder cried out to him in pain, saw what he considered to be the least appealing sight he'd ever seen in his life: three more dogs at the end of the hall he'd just turned into.

At the earliest opportunity he smashed himself into a classroom door -he didn't have time to see if it happened to be locked or not- ran across the the room, and jumped for the window at full speed.

On the other side he didn't appear to be impaled by any large pieces of glass and didn't feel liked he'd severed any major blood vessels, so he assumed he'd live at least a bit longer and started running to what he thought was the nearest way back into the school: another window they'd broken, that one with something less fragile than a human body and as part of a coherent plan.

He needed to get back inside because the only thing that had kept him alive so far was being more maneuverable in the tighter indoor spaces.

Once he was moving at a decent pace in what he thought was the right direction, he hit "the hole that looks like a button belongs over it" on the Kimmunicator and said, "Wade, we have a problem," the moment he heard it crackle.

"I see them," Wade said, "but they weren't there a moment ago."

"I don't really care where they were a moment ago right now," Josh said. It was harder to speak than he thought it should have been. He was running out of steam.

"I'll tell you the moment I've found a way to help," Wade said, "Until then I don't think you want me distracting you."

"Find it fast," Josh said.

⁂

When Tara's phone rang she answered it with, "I was about to call you."

"We need to help Josh," Wade said. "Wait, why were you going to call me?"

"Josh," Tara said. "He's the only one from the distraction that hasn't made it in. What's going on out there?"

"He can't shake the dogs," Wade said, "and it looks like they're materializing inside the school, so now there are more of them and they've joined the hunt."

"Materializing. . ." the truth was that Tara didn't really care about how things fit together right now. However, some part of her brain was still looking for patterns and trying to put puzzle pieces together. That part had an idea. "At the explosion site?" Tara asked.

"I don't know," Wade said, "maybe."

"Not important right now," Tara said. "What do we do to get Josh safely in here?"

⁂

Ron's head still hurt horribly, but he was steady on his feet and he was, he felt, ready for action. When Tara picked up the phone he listened, all that he could really make out from Tara's side of the conversation was that Josh needed help.

He thought he vaguely remembered Tara talking to Wade over one of the school's phones around the time she stopped carrying him and he started walking. Maybe she was talking to Wade now.

"Is that Wade?" he asked Tara.

Tara nodded.

"May I?" he asked. Tara just handed him the phone. "Wade, what's the sitch?"

"Kim tried to use the transportulator to get to you, but instead she just disappeared," Wade said. "There was a possibly related explosion in an unoccupied area of the school, but no one's been able to check it out because giant black dogs have been attacking people. I can't tell if they're related to Kim or the explosion.

"It would be an extraordinary coincidence if they weren't, but we've seen bigger ones on a monthly basis so-"

"What about Josh?" Ron asked.

"The dogs seem to be coming from inside -I don't know how- almost of them have left the area and are terrorizing the rest of Middleton, but about a dozen are still there, and they're chasing Josh" Wade said. "They're too fast to outrun, too close behind him to hide from, and all of the work he's doing to evade them has got to be wearing him out."

Ron thought about it for a moment. "Is the roof safe?"

"How would he get to it?" Tara asked.

"I'm with Tara on this one," Wade said. "Even if he could manage to get the keys to unlock the maintenance access to the roof, which is doubtful when he's on the run, he'd end up showing the dogs the way."

"My grappler is still in my locker," Ron said.

"Are you sure?" Wade asked. "I don't even remember the last time you used it."

"Trust the Ron man," Ron said.

"The Ron man has a head injury," Tara said. "Maybe you should sit this out."

"Ok, so you'll need to get to your locker, have time to go through your mess, get the grappler, and then get to Josh," Wade said. "All with a dozen death dogs of doom on the loose."

Wade sighed, "Can I talk to Tara?"

Ron was confused. Where did Tara come into this? "Uh, sure," he said, and handed Tara her phone.

⁂

"Josh is running out of time, and Ron's plan is the best idea -the only idea- so far," Wade said. "I can't exactly scan Ron through your phone, I need you and Rufus to decide if Ron is really up for this."

"Ok," Tara said into the phone, then she looked at the naked mole rat whose head was peeking out of Ron's pocket. "Rufus, do you think we can keep Ron safe?"

Rufus said, "Sure thing," or at least Tara was pretty sure that was what he said, and gave a salute.

Tara said, "We're doing Ron's plan," to Wade.

"Wait, we?" Ron asked.

"You're not going alone," Tara said. Then she realized her mistake and said, "Sorry," to Rufus. "You're not going as the sole human," she amended to Ron.

"I'm coming too," Bonnie said.

"What!?" Ron and Tara said in unison.

"T, I'm not letting you go out there with only . . . _him_ to keep you safe," Bonnie said.

It might be legitimate concern, it might be that she was hoping that saving Josh Mankey would win her a date with Josh Mankey. Probably both, actually. It didn't matter.

"Josh doesn't have time for us to argue," Tara said as she headed for the exit. Bonnie and Ron fell in beside her. "Bonnie, give me your phone."

Tara called Wade on Bonnie's phone, "Wade, I need you on this phone and my phone directing two of us while we make distractions to give Josh and Ron the time they need," she said and then handed the phone back to Bonnie.

⁂

Every part of Josh ached and he was so exhausted that simply collapsing to the floor seemed like the most inviting of all possible options. The fact that that would get him mauled and possibly eaten was seeming less and less important the more time went on. He just wanted to stop.

For the love of all that was holy, all he wanted to do was rest.

He'd been going in erratic vaguely circle-like things forever, counting on the tight corners he was making to keep on buying back the seconds he was constantly losing to his pursuers.

The Kimmunicator crackled to life.

"Thought you forgot about me," he said. It felt like hours since they'd spoken.

"Sorry," Wade said. "There's not a lot to work with so-"

"Just tell me there's a plan," Josh said.

"How do you feel about rooftops?" Wade asked.

"Please make sense," Josh said. It was more pleading though. Would this damned night ever be over?

"Grappling gun to the school roof, unless the dogs can fly or climb vertical walls they won't be able to follow," Wade said.

"I can't go back to Kim's locker," Josh said. Too much straight line, not enough tight corner, the dogs would run him down before he made it.

"Ron's getting the grappler," Wade said, "Tara and someone else are running interference."

Tight corner, shoulder pain, but at least the sound of a multi-dog pile up, though even that was losing its appeal. The only thing that mattered was somehow being able to stop going.

So, talking to Wade, difficult though it was, might be worth it.

"Someone else?" Josh asked.

"I didn't ask her name," Wade said, "but she should be working to get you some breathing room."

"God, I hope so," Josh said.

⁂

Tara and Ron had an easy time getting to the school, with all the dogs in the area tripping over themselves to try to get to Josh, the only thing they had to avoid were newly appeared dogs leaving the area.

It wasn't that hard. Bonnie had stayed behind in the gym. Unlike the school building itself, the gym had a simple -easy to locate and use- back up generator. Once the gym had power it could be put to good use, which is what Bonnie was supposed to do as soon as Ron and Tara were clear.

Part one of the plan was to try to break up the dog pack chasing Josh. It carried with it some risk. A dozen giant dogs in a school hallway probably were slowing each other down, and certainly if two tried to fit through a doorway at once they'd go slower than one, so fewer dogs after Josh probably would mean that they were going faster. But fewer was the first step on the way to none.

Bonnie's voice came over the gym's PA, "Attention to all of the angry dogs in the area, you seem to have made a mistake. The Middleton Mad Dog is singular, not-black, a bulldog, and played by a sidekick in a mascot mask he made himself."

There was a reason Bonnie's talent show performance had been ballet and not comedy.

"Now that I've cleared this up for you, I expect you all to _leave_. You have interrupted the talent show that I was about to win and I want you gone."

After that things just got more generic, but Tara had to admit that Bonnie was doing her job. It would be impossible for the dogs to miss that something had changed and there was something happening at the gym.

In addition to turning on the PA system, they'd powered up everything they could find power switches, knobs or dials for. With the entrance to the fallout shelter firmly locked behind them, the only person at risk at the gym should be Bonnie herself, and she had Wade to tell her when the dogs were actually on their way in.

They'd figure out how to get the dogs back away from the gym later. Right now they needed to get them away from Josh.

Her phone rang. She answered, "Go, Wade."

"It looks like several of the dogs are breaking off their pursuit of Josh and heading for the gym," Wade said. "Also I have some sort of good news."

"Sort of good?" Tara asked.

"The other things," Wade said, "the cold dark things, it doesn't look like they're staying in the area; after you drove them off the first time I guess they didn't want to stick around. Plus, analysis of their movements earlier suggests that they weren't hunting so much as they happened on the people making the crossing from the school to the shelter."

"Sort of good," Tara said. She didn't feel good about it. She didn't feel bad about. She didn't feel about it period. She just mentally filed it away.

"Well, it means you don't have to worry about them right now," Wade said.

"Thanks for the update," Tara said. "What about dealing with the rest of the dogs? There's no power in here so we can't just distract them with the PA."

"Yeah, and the explosion seems to have been in the main office so there might not be anything there to use anyway," Wade said. "I'm trying put together an inventory of what's in the school to see if there's anything useful, but the record keeping is atrocious."

 _Yeah_ , Tara thought, _almost as bad as the safety standards_. Then the proverbial carcinogenic chemical light lit.

"Wade," Tara asked, "could you get us to the science labs?"

Ron, who had been uncharacteristically quiet so far, said, "Please tell me you're not going to open an inter-dimensional portal with Justine's . . . thingy."

"No," Tara said. "Creative idea, but no. I was thinking more of recreating some of the more mundane mishaps, just on purpose and directed at the dogs this time."

⁂

Wade had said that some of the dogs had been drawn away, but Josh hadn't noticed a difference.

Then there had been a prolonged lack of communication. Josh liked to think that he was generally a positive person, but he was beginning to suspect that maybe he should just accept that he was going to die soon and try to make peace with it. However one did that.

At the very least it had to be better than all this running.

Then something went boom behind him, with a flash of light, and he couldn't help turning, just a bit, to look.

He fell over and ended up sliding a bit and rolling a bit on the floor. He didn't bother trying to get back up. It was over.

Then he felt himself being lifted up.

"Come on," someone said, "before they find another way around or realize that it was all flash and no substance."

"Wade, Tara's plan worked," someone else said, "where's the nearest exit?"

⁂

"How many windows do you think we've smashed tonight?" Tara asked Ron and Josh. Ron was looking a lot better; Josh was looking a lot worse.

"No idea," Ron said just before smashing one more. "I do know you set part of the school on fire."

"I didn't notice a fire," Josh said.

Given that the first thing he'd said to Ron and her, at least a full minute after they'd started carrying him, was, "Am I dead?" Tara didn't think Josh had been noticing much at that point. Still, he was right, there had been no fire that time. Just a strange bubbling pink gooey mass that had a tendency to explode with bright light, loud noise, and very little actual effect upon anything.

"He's taking about earlier," Tara said, "before we got to you." She and Ron carried Josh out of the window. When they set Josh down and Ron fired off his grappling hook launcher, which was, for some reason, shaped like a hair dryer, Tara asked Ron, "Do you think it's still burning?"

⁂

"Booyah!" Ron said once Tara and Josh were safely on the roof. He'd have preferred to have the others go first, but he couldn't help lift if he were on the ground, and Tara was lighter, so it made sense to have her be the one getting Josh up and him to be the one to go first.

Josh, for his part, barely seemed able to stand, much less climb the side of a building.

Now they just had to get Bonnie and themselves to safety.

⁂

Josh woke up -he didn't remember falling asleep- in a room that he'd never seen before. It was a big thing with low ceilings and bare concrete walls. Someone was talking to a group of people, when Josh picked it up, she was mid sentence:

"-word that the high school will be one of the primary evacuation centers tomorrow, so all we need to do is stay the night here, then we'll be flown to safety tomorrow and professionals can handle this."

A bit more awake, Josh could see that the speaker was the blonde girl who had been watching over Ron in the backstage room. Josh had been assuming that she was Tara ever since Wade first used the name.

That was ok for a name over a Kimmunicator, since all that he'd really needed to know was that "Tara's group" was the one he was directing people to, not who Tara actually was. Now that they were in the same place he'd have to check, at some point, that that really was her name.

"Who put you two in charge?" someone in the group asked. It was the kind of thing that, even though, in the form of a question, was pretty much always raw invective. This time wasn't any different than that usual.

"Uh, we _three_ ," Bonnie said. Josh didn't know Bonnie much better than he knew maybe-Tara, but Bonnie was impossible to miss. Bonnie made sure it was always that way. That meant that Josh had no problem remembering her name.

"Sure, whatever," the same someone said. "Why are you people in charge?"

"Because no one else is," the girl who might be Tara said. If she was then she had saved him. The whole rescue was a fuzzy blur, but he remembered someone saying, "Tara's plan worked," right after the dogs stopped following him, and Wade had said before that that Tara, Ron, and someone else were involved in the rescue attempt.

If she was Tara, or "someone else" for that matter, Josh would have to thank her.

Possibly Tara added, "As for who put us in charge, Wade did."

"Who?" someone else asked.

"Team Possible's tech guru," Ron said

"The one who got us to this shelter alive," person he thought was Tara said. "Or did you fail to notice that the whole thing was coordinated over the phone."

Josh didn't know Tara, obviously. He didn't even know her name for sure. But he'd seen her around and he knew that she usually wasn't confrontational. He'd never seen her in a fight, never heard her utter harsh words, seen no indications of animosity of any sort. She'd always seemed to be friendly to whoever she was around.

So, the way she had responded was definitely not normal for her. It had been a long night, nerves were frayed.

"If Team Possible is running things," the first someone said, "then where is Kim?"

"Missing," Ron said in a way that made Josh fully expect it to be followed by, "you-" wait, did Ron even swear? Regardless, the way it was said made Josh anticipate a "you [something very bad]" that never came. Ron left it at a single word.

It hung in the air for a bit. Josh wanted more information but knew that there probably wasn't any. The search for more information on what happened to Kim was called off before it even began.

Ron, probably-Tara, and Bonnie's phones all rang at the same time.

⁂

"Wade, I can't tell you how much I don't want to hear bad news," Tara said.

"Sorry," Wade said.

"Just sitch us," Ron said and Tara heard it in weird double because it she could hear him directly and over the phone.

"Remember how you said the cold dark things could make it really cold when they swarmed, Tara?" Wade said.

And Tara felt a sinking feeling.

"They're swarming," she said; it wasn't a question.

"They're appearing much faster now," Wade said, "much, much faster, and they don't appear to have any intention of leaving the area. If the temperature keeps dropping at the present rate-"

"We'll be dead before morning?" Tara asked.

"Uh, yeah," Wade said. "Pretty much."

Tara looked at the crowd of people, who were all reacting to what they'd heard her say. She looked directly at the senior who had been asking about why she and Ron were in charge before, and said, "If anyone else wants to be in charge, now would be a great time to step up."

Barkin was off inspecting the something or other, or else he'd have claimed command, but of the people who were in this part of the shelter, no one said anything.

"Ok, now that that's settled," Tara said, then she returned her attention to the phone, "Wade, do we have a plan?"

⁂

Ron, Tara, and Bonnie had gone to a corner of the shelter to plan. It happened to be the corner that Josh was in because he was a part of this too by now and, more importantly, he'd gone trick-or-treating with Ron last year as one half of a two person unicorn costume, and as far as Ron was concerned anyone who would do that was totally cool in his eyes.

They put Bonnie's phone on speaker because the prototype Kimmunicator had an annoying crackling sound and of the phones Bonnie's had the best speaker mode. Then they started to brainstorm.

It went, Ron thought, fairly badly.

"It's not that I can't make something that produces enough light or heat to drive them off, given what it took last time and extrapolating for-"

"Wade, I think you're losing the second half of your bifurcated thought," Tara said.

Ron wasn't sure what bifurcated meant, though it presumably had something to do with the number two and fur.

Wade, obviously, did know. For one thing, he was Wade. For another, he responded, "It's just that I can't do it in time."

"Could you help Ron and Rufus build something?" Tara asked.

Ron said, "What!?" at the same time Bonnie did. Then he said, "Jinx, you owe me a-" and stopped when he caught Bonnie's glare.

So it was straight on to the complete confusion, "What makes you think I can-"

Bonnie, being Bonnie, cut him off, "T, he can't build some super science device."

"Are you sure?" Tara asked.

"Yes!" Bonnie said.

"Tara, I'm-" Ron said.

Tara, being most un-Tara-like, cut him off. "Rufus can program a VCR, you once built a doomsday device, and Wade is a certified genius. I think the three of you can come up with something."

Ron tried to think of when he would have built a- right: when Rufus briefly became a super genius and everyone thought it was Ron. Drakken had kidnapped him and forced him to build a doomsday device which, while not leading to doomsday, did in fact, surprisingly, work. It had given him the confidence he'd needed to stop failing algebra last school year.

⁂

Bonnie tried to stop herself from shaking. Her hands in particular since she was assembling something that was supposed to save their lives, but really if she could get any part of her to be still she'd count it as a win. Her mouth was clamped firmly shut to stop her teeth from chattering so she couldn't even complain. The rest of her was not so easily stilled. The shivers ran deep.

She plugged in a wire with numb fingers, and looked for the next part.

They'd talked through it all inside, of course, but that wasn't the same as assembling it. Not out here.

It was snowing.

The roof of the gym made sense. It was a high place so the light would have good range, it was a roof so they could be safe from the dogs.

Her fingers were numb. It was snowing.

"Everything's hooked up," she heard Tara say. "Now we see if you're as good as I think you are."

Under normal circumstances Bonnie might roll her eyes or think, "No innuendo there, nope, none at all," but these weren't normal circumstances.

 _We're all gonna die_ , Bonnie thought.

"Cover your eyes B," Tara said. Bonnie did, not that she thought it would matter, not that she thought this cobbled together thing would even work. She did because Tara was a friend, and she saw little harm in humoring a friend who, like her, wouldn't live to see tomorrow.

Then, at the edges of her vision, where the arm she was covering her eyes with met her face, she saw red light. As if she were shining a flashlight though her fingers.

"I told you it would work!" Tara said.

Bonnie couldn't be sure, but she thought she felt less cold.

"So, how do we get off the roof without blinding ourselves?" Ron asked.

⁂

 **2004 – The After**

Behind her Kim heard shouting. Alarm was being raised. She kept running. There was a tiny impact on the rock to her right -chips of rock seemed to jump from the wall of their own accord- she heard the shot a moment later. That was no shotgun.

Someone had obviously broken out a rifle and they hadn't missed by much. Whoever it was was too good of a shot for her to risk giving them another. She had to break line of sight.

She was near an exit to the chamber, but not close enough. A glance at the ground showed a loose gravely consistency. She dropped into a slide, a bullet passed through the air above her.

Much too close. Much too good of a shot. She had to get into the close twists of the tunnels; the open air of the cavern was a death sentence.

She rolled and twisted to position herself, then launched into a sprint. Almost as soon as she was safely around a corner she heard another bullet hit the rocks. She didn't turn to look, but it sounded like it had landed right where she'd been a moment ago.

Kim, very definitely, hated guns. Give her energy blasters, death rays, Rube Goldberg traps, and so forth any day.

All plans were on hold now. Her presence was known, they were firing guns -actual bullet-shooting guns- at her, survival was the only concern right now.

When she'd started to get called for dangerous missions her mother had sat down with Kim and told her that she couldn't help anyone if she didn't look after herself.

That definitely would be true if she died here.

What even happened if a living person died in the After? Would she just stay in the exact same place? Would she be sent to a place with people more like her?

She didn't want to find out.

She was running for the third time since she arrived and two things wouldn't leave her mind.

The first was that this time was different. She wasn't being hunted by animals, as it had been with dogs, nor was she fleeing from a single person, as had been the case with the ghost. This time an intelligent and organized group was after her.

The second was that the day, if it was the same day, had been long and tiring. If she needed to run as fast or as far as she had before then she would fail, her pursuers would catch her. She simply didn't have the same energy she started with.

Given the work Kim did, it was important to be able to distinguish between temporary exhaustion -which could be recovered from fairly quickly, hours at most- and actually being tapped out. This was the latter. She wasn't spent for the moment, or even the hour; she was without any reserves to call on.

If she survived she would need to find a place to hide. To rest and recover. If she survived.

⁂

Kim was still going as fast as she could, but it wasn't what it used to be. She'd slowed into a jog, and was doubtless losing whatever gains she'd made on her pursuers.

And then she saw the millipede. It was bigger than a person. Well, maybe not bigger. Longer than a person was tall. Perhaps it had less volume than a person but . . .

As it crawled Kim watched with horror and tried to remember what it was that had seemed so important a few moments ago. Big. Huge. It was really, really big.

Oh God, it was . . .

A voice behind her, she couldn't make out the words, pulled Kim back into the moment. She realized that she was standing completely still. She didn't remember stopping. She didn't know how long she'd been stopped for. Didn't matter, she'd lost precious seconds, maybe more. She resumed her exhausted jog and mentally cursed herself for letting a mere giant insect send her into a near catatonic state.

At the next fork she'd try to fake a trail in the direction she didn't go. Maybe that would buy her some time back.

⁂

Kim had finally bought some breathing room, but it would be useless if she didn't find a place to hide. She needed to lose her pursuers; she couldn't just stay ahead of them indefinitely.

She searched the shadows of this cavern looking for anything-

"Aren't you an odd little one?" a female voice commented. There was something strange about the voice. It didn't seem to come _from_ anywhere. Normally Kim could pinpoint a sound, distance and direction, without even trying. Sure, since she'd landed in this place there had been many misleading echos, and intentional tricks could mess her up a lot too, but there wasn't a kind of either echo or trick and yet she had no inkling of where the sound had come from.

Kim looked around and saw nothing but rock, dirt, decaying plant matter, and ferociously large spider webs. It wasn't the worst cavern she'd been in. It didn't even rate in the worst ten. No sign of the source of the voice though.

No indication of threat from it either. True, it probably would turn out badly, but before it did maybe Kim could gain useful information by speaking. At least she might learn who was here with her.

"Who said that?" she asked cautiously.

"Oh... 'said' isn't the right word, dear little friend," the voice responded. "My species doesn't have a larynx, so I'm afraid English isn't something I could vocalize."

Kim processed that somewhat disturbing tidbit and decided that, if she graded on a curve, it only rated as a weird factor of two on as scale from one to ten.

"English," the voice 'said'. The tone was musing, more focused on its own thoughts, it seemed to Kim, than the conversation. "I haven't seen one such as you since Vergil was giving guided tours. Back then what you know as English didn't exist.

"That was almost a century before your _English_ bard Chaucer famously wrote in his native tongue. I doubt you'd recognize his language as English, dear little friend."  
That was true. Kim had once listened to an excerpt of _The Canterbury Tales_ recited in properly pronounced Middle English once. It had been beautiful and captivating, but she hadn't understood it in the least and Kim wouldn't have known it was a form of English if she hadn't been told before the recitation.

The voice had said so many words, but Kim still had no idea where the voice was coming from or, for that matter, how this communication was taking place.

"If you aren't speaking," Kim asked, "why can I hear you?"

"Why I'm thinking at you, dear little friend."

Kim wasn't sure what to make of that.

"Why haven't you shown yourself to me?" Kim asked.

"Because you haven't asked me to," the voice thought at Kim.

"Would you let me see you?" Kim asked.

"If you'd like, dear little friend," the voice said.

"Please and thank you," Kim said.

"Turn around," the voice said.

Kim did and at first she saw nothing. Then she caught a hint of movement above her. She looked up and saw something descending slowly. The closer it came the clearer it was. Two ball like sections -like a figure eight or a peanut- and some protrusion... oh God, eight legs!

Kim stood statue still as the giant spider descended. She didn't want to, she needed to put more space between herself and her human-like pursuers, for one thing. She should still be moving as fast as she could, but instead she could barely breathe.

Two of the eyes were larger than the rest and the spider was now so near that she could see her own reflection in them.

It was the spider's abdomen, though, that drew most of Kim's attention. The cephalothorax looked more or less like she expected a cephalothorax to look, aside from the fact that it was larger than her own thorax. The abdomen, though, there was something odd about that. It was covered in strange lumps. Kim didn't expect a spider, even a giant spider, to have an extremely bumpy abdomen.

It was when Kim caught hints of motion in the bumps that she realized the truth. The bumps weren't part of the spider. The bumps were not growths on the spider. The spider was carrying it's very live young on its abdomen, and each of the bumps was itself a giant spider. A baby spider that was already giant by spider standards.

That was the revelation that allowed Kim to breathe, to move, and to resume her exhausted jog.

"You'll never escape," the spider thought at her.

"Am I caught in your web?" Kim asked, hoping that sarcasm would beat back her fear.

"I don't have a web, dear little friend," the spider thought at her calmly. "I'm a hunter, not a trapper.

"The webs were here when I moved in, and I keep them around because I feel they give the place a nice ambiance."

"I'm not interested in your interior decorating!" Kim shouted. It might have had more effect if not for the fact she had to do it between ragged breaths and it was, at best, at half volume.

"Then to the point," came the spider's voice. "I was not referring to myself when I mentioned that you would not escape. The ones who chase you are not far behind and would have found you sooner or later even without your shouting.

"You know I'd have heard you just as clearly if you merely thought you commentary in my general direction, dear little friend."

"Fine," Kim thought trying to send it in the general direction of the spider. "Whatever." Kim didn't slow her pace. "You underestimate my chances."

"Oh," the spider thought back, "I don't doubt that you'll put up a fight, but this is no place for creatures from the living world. I very much doubt you'll survive.

"Even so, dear little friend, do fight. Fight until your dying breath," the spider thought at her. "Then the ones who catch you will be wounded. Easy prey. I believe you've noticed that I have a family to feed. It would be a shame if we only had you to eat."

⁂

This was new. A tangled mass of twisting tunnels. To reach it she had to jump hip deep in decaying _something_ , but it might be just what she needed: a place where she might be able to lose her pursuers without needing to be faster.

"I harbor no animosity toward you," the spider said.

"You said you'd eat me!" Kim shouted in her mind.

"It's what I do; it isn't personal."

"It's personal to me!"

"Really? You had some personal grudge against everything you've ever eaten?" the spider asked. "It seems a strange way to live to me. It must be exhausting to have so many vendettas and harbor so much distaste." There was a pause, but not long enough for Kim to figure out how to respond. The spider continued, "Tell me, if you find yourself without enemies, do you go hungry rather than eat something you have nothing against?"

"It's not the same," Kim said.

"I imagine that the things that have died to feed you didn't like the prospect of dying any more than you do."

"I don't hold conversations with my food-"

"That's awfully impersonal -just kill them and eat them- especially for someone who takes things so personally," the spider thought at her. "But to the point: are you suggesting that you'd find the prospect of me eating you more appealing had I refrained from conversing with you first?"  
"I don't eat things capable of holding conversations. I never eat anything as sapient as you or me."

"How could you know that if you don't talk to your food?"

"You're planning to kill me," Kim thought. "Conversation over."

"No, I've said I'm going to eat you," came the spider's voice. "If you'd paid attention you'd know that I'm not planning on killing anyone until you're already dead."

"That's very comforting."  
"In fact, you could say that I'm planning to avenge you. And then eat your killer once the deed is done."

"I think I'll pass on the whole dying and being avenged thing," Kim thought.

"I doubt that, but I encourage you to try," the spider responded.

"So that'll be easier for you to kill and eat my pursuers."

"As I said." There was a moment's silence. "It is strange for them to have come so far, and with such conviction too. You must have angered them a great deal, dear little friend."

Kim sent no thoughts in the spider's direction.

"They rarely come into our territory at all."

"I wonder why."

"No you don't. You don't wonder because you believe that you already know," the spider said, "but you are incorrect about their reasons, dear little friend.

"It has nothing to do with squeamishness such as your own."

"Then what is it?" Kim asked.

"They are death and we are life. We convert death into life - the others more so than I. The others feed on death, I feed on the others, and one day I in turn shall be fed upon and so all of us together perpetuate life.

"Those who chase you have no interest in new life, new growth, or rebirth.

"They would freeze themselves in death and prevent any life from benefiting from what they refuse to leave behind," came the spider's voice. "They wish to remain in their former bodies so badly that they've willed new bodies into existence here in the After, but they cannot escape the fact that they are dead.

"Instead of feeding a new generation of life, their bodies decompose in a most unnatural way. Microbes and small bugs might feed on them, but for the most part . . .

"Well, they dislike the idea of being eaten even more than you do, and so they refuse to stand aside and let new life be born of what they ought to leave behind.

"They are decay without regrowth, they are death without life, and so they hate everything that we represent.

"What I eat, dear little friend, gives life to me and, since I share, to my children as well. When I am gone my body will give life to whomever should happen to eat me, probably a carrion eater, and that one will in turn be eaten to give life to yet another.

"You may be disgusted by what we do, but without the endless cycle of death and life all life would cease.

"Whether I eat you today, or you prove me wrong, live to a ripe old age, and aren't fed upon until you're laid to rest in your grave and the much smaller agents of regrowth upon your word feed upon you, one day you will be the fuel that allows something else to keep living. That is how the cycle will continue. Your death will give life.

"Those you flee would see that cycle stop, simply because they fancy themselves more worthy than the things that would feed upon them.

There was a pause, and Kim wondered if the spider's monologue had truly ended or it was for some kind of dramatic effect.

"On your left," came the spider's voice.

It wasn't, exactly, that Kim trusted the spider. The reasoning did make a certain amount of sense though: let Kim weaken the others, then pick off those left standing after the fight. So she didn't really hesitate. Kim lunged sideways and her body smashed into one of the corpses that had been chasing her. A gun was dropped into the muck they were both wading through and Kim did her best to keep her pursuer from the area it had fallen in.

⁂

"It seems I was wrong, dear little friend," came the spider's voice.

"About what?" Kim asked aloud, slightly smug.

"You've made it through my territory alive, and now no one chases you. It seems you won't die today after all."

"You must be disappointed," Kim said.

"Not in the least, dear little friend," came the spider's voice. "You weakened my prey wonderfully, and my family will dine well for some time now."

Kim tried not to think about that.

⁂

Time was impossible to track in this place, so she had no idea how long she'd been going -minutes, hours, days?- when carelessness caused her to bump into a brownish sphere the size of a beach-ball.

She had barely been managing a walk. That kind of extremely low speed collision normally wouldn't be a problem at all.

As she was picking herself off of the ground she saw the sphere begin to uncurl into some kind of insect with segmented armor.

"S-sorry, I didn't see you there," Kim said. "It- it was a mistake so. . . no hard feelings, right?"

The bug didn't respond and simply walked away.

⁂

Kim was barely keeping her eyes open when she reached the ants.

She didn't run, she didn't freak, she didn't do much of anything. They ignored her.

"Look, are you gonna eat me?" she asked.

One of the giant ants looked in her direction, but only for a moment.

Kim trudged onward.

⁂

The ants, it seemed, were farmers. Kim was near one of their mushroom groves when exhaustion finally took over and she staggered toward a place to lay down in a sort of controlled fall.

She was sleeping amoung the mushrooms moments after collapsing completely.

x  
x x  
x x x  
x x  
x

Took forever to get this revision done. After this stuff will be more or less new since the next, say, six chapters were condensed into one chapter in the original run.

Shin's girlfriend Kieran Not-Appearing-In-This-Work is, like Shin, Blackbird's creation. (I also have permission to use her, but she's not appearing in this work, only mentioned.)

The vast majority of the time this spent in revision was me trying and failing to get Kim's journey in the after to come out right.


End file.
